Racism, stress, and coping: A laboratory-to-field analysis

Recent attempts to capture experiences of racism in the laboratory setting have shown great promise. Past studies have shown that racially noxious laboratory stressors evoke significant psychological and physiological reactions in subjects. To date, however, very little is known about how individuals cope with these stressors.;This investigation was conducted with three general goals: (1) to assess the prevalence of experiences of racism among a sample of Black college students; (2) to determine whether the sample's coping responses to stressful laboratory vignettes are similar to their coping responses to real-life stressors; and (3) to examine whether the sample's coping responses to racist stressors are similar to their coping responses to nonracist stressors.;Three hundred fourteen, Black male and female students were screened as prospective participants for this study. Of those, 72 students reporting a recent experience of racism were selected. The participants were interviewed about their experience of racism as well as one recent nonracist experience. Additionally, they were presented with two audiotaped scenes in which they were to imagine themselves: a racist scene that was similar to their real-life racist experience, and a nonracist scene (i.e., being stuck in a traffic jam while going to the airport). Coping responses to all four stressors were assessed.;The descriptive findings indicated that 27% of the total subject pool (n = 86) reported an experience of racism. Furthermore, multivariate analyses of variance showed that the participants used active coping strategies, vented their emotions, and turned to religion more, and sought emotional support from others less, when responding to laboratory stressors than when responding to real-life stressors. The participants also turned to religion less, and sought emotional support from others more, when responding to nonracist stressors than to racist stressors. There were no differences in the use of restraint, however, across the four conditions. Low to moderate correlations between the participants' coping strategies to real-life racist stressors and their respective coping strategies to laboratory racist stressors indicated a significant disparity between the two conditions.;Overall, these findings highlight the complex nature of the coping process. The findings further show that more research is needed. It is suggested that future research focus on factors that differentially affect coping responses across settings.