ArticleBehavioral sleep medicine
Examining How Racial Discrimination Impacts Sleep Quality in African Americans: Is Perseveration the Answer?
Article in Behavioral sleep medicine. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Correlates of Sleep Disturbance Experienced by Informal Caregivers of Persons Living with Dementia: A Systematic Review.Clinical gerontologistPooled it
- Maladaptive coping strategies mediate the relationship between perceived differential treatment and sleep health among women.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2026Article
- Multilevel associations between discrimination and sleep health among ethnically and racially minoritized students during the college transition: Coping as a mediator.Cultural diversity & ethnic minority psychology · 2026Article
- Joint Effects of Workplace and Everyday Discrimination on Sleep Disturbances: A 9-Year Prospective Cohort Study in U.S. Employees.International journal of behavioral medicine · 2026Article
- Associations between perceived discrimination and sleep health: Results from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Young Adult Sleep Study.Sleep health · 2026Article
- Racial Discrimination Predicting Sleep: Examining Social Media and Television/Digital Media use During the COVID-19 Pandemic as Moderators among College Students of Color.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Gendered Racial Microaggressions and Sleep Quality: Examining the Potential Mediating Role of Mental Health in Asian American Women.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Discrimination in Middle Eastern and North African Americans predicts Worse Mental Health as Mediated by Sleep.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2025Article
- Skin tone - a marker of bias known as colorism - in relation to sleep health among African American women.SSM - population health · 2025Article
- Online and offline gendered racial microaggressions and sleep quality for Black women.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2025Article
- Pathways to maternal health inequities: Structural racism, sleep, and physiological stress.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2025Review
- Evaluating the indirect roles of anxiety and depressive symptoms in the relations between negative emotional reactivity to racial/ethnic stress and cigarette smoking among Hispanic adults who smoke.Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology · 2024Article
- Microaggression and discrimination exposure on young adult anxiety, depression, and sleep.Journal of affective disorders · 2024Article
- Article
- Rumination mediates associations between microaggressions and sleep quality in Black Americans: the toll of racial microstressors.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2024Article
- "It's all connected:" A mixed methods study of insomnia, stigma, and discrimination among individuals on medication for opioid use disorder.Sleep health · 2024Article
- Negative emotional reactivity to minority stress: measure development and testing.Cognitive behaviour therapy · 2024Article
- Not Just Time on Social Media: Experiences of Online Racial/Ethnic Discrimination and Worse Sleep Quality for Black, Latinx, Asian, and Multi-racial Young Adults.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2023Article
- Perceived racial/ethnic discrimination among young adult college students: Prevalence rates and associations with mental health.Journal of American college health : J of ACH · 2023Article
- Gendered Racial Microaggressions and Black Women's Sleep Health.Social psychology quarterly · 2023Article
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Abstract
backgroundAfrican Americans experience more problematic and disordered sleep than White Americans. Racial discrimination has been implicated in this disparity. However, the mechanisms by which discrimination disrupts sleep are unclear. It has been theorized that Perseverative Cognition (PC), characterized by recurrent patterns of reflective (i.e., rumination) and anticipatory (i.e., worry) negative thinking about personally relevant stressors, may reflect the functional mechanism linking discrimination to sleep. The present study is the first to empirically examine the dual components of PC as a candidate functional mechanism in the association between racial discrimination and subjective sleep quality.
participantsSixty-eight self-identified African American college students (55.9% female; M
methodsThe participants completed the Perceived Ethnic Discrimination Questionnaire (PEDQ), Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ), and Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS).
resultsAfter adjusting for age, gender, and social class, results revealed a significant indirect effect of racial discrimination (RD) on subjective sleep quality through rumination, 95% CI [.008, .125], but not worry. RD was positively associated with rumination, b =.50, SE =.16, p = .003, and rumination, in turn, was positively associated with poorer sleep quality, b = .09, SE = .04, p = .012.
conclusionsAs both RD and poor sleep quality have been directly linked to heart disease, diabetes, depression, and a number of other maladies, our findings suggest that RD, sleep, and coping strategies (e.g., rumination) employed to manage RD experiences may be important targets for addressing racial disparities in health.
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