Racial discrimination experiences constitute significant risks for ethnic minority youth's physical and mental health problems. One explanation poses that chronic stress can lead to altered, dysregulated stress responses, which can make individuals susceptible to health problems. Currently, there is no experimental study that comprehensively measure ethnic minority youth's stress response to subtle racism, or investigate the contributing roles of racial discrimination experience and possible risk and protective factors.~A community sample of 11-14-year-old ethnic minority adolescents (40 Latino American, 40 Black/African American) and their parents will be recruited. The study employs an adapted peer rejection task which has been widely used with youth, and carefully designed to elicit the experience of subtle racial discrimination from White peers. Adolescents' cardiovascular activity and saliva samples will be taken at multiple time points before, during, and after the peer rejection task, tapping on response involving hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, autonomic nervous system (ANS), and inflammatory mediator (IM). Adolescents will report their racial discrimination experience, make attribution about the peer rejection experience, and rate their racial identity. Parents will complete a questionnaire to report their ethnic-racial socialization practices.~The goals of this proposal are: 1) Reveal the relationship between racial discrimination experiences and ethnic minority adolescents' stress response to subtle racism; and 2) Test parental ethnic-racial socialization, children's attribution to subtle racism and their racial identity as potential risk and protective factors.
The goal of this study is to learn about whether ethnic minority adolescents' racial discrimination experience is related to dysregulated biological responses to subtle racism, and how the relationship may be attenuated or exacerbated by a set of social and cognitive factors. The main questions it aims to answer are:~to reveal the relationship between racial discrimination experiences and ethnic minority adolescents' stress response to subtle racism~to test parental ethnic-racial socialization, children's attribution to subtle racism and their racial identity as potential risk and protective factors.