Person:

Mendes, Wendy

We examined the possibility of an in-group advantage in detecting intergroup anxiety. Specifically, we videotaped White and Black participants while they engaged in same-race or interrace interactions. Then we asked White and Black observers to view these videotapes (unaware of the racial context) and provide their impressions of participants' anxiety. Two results pointed to an in-group advantage in detecting intergroup anxiety. First, only same-race observers perceived a modulation of participants' anxious behavior as a function of racial context. This held true not only for relatively subjective perceptions of global anxiety, but also for perceptions of single, discrete behaviors tied to anxiety. Second, we found that only same-race observers provided descriptions of anxiety that tracked reliably with participants' cortisol changes during the task. These results suggest that White and Black Americans may have difficulty developing a sense of shared emotional experience.

It has been suggested that people engage in nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) because they (a) experience heightened physiological arousal following stressful events and use NSSI to regulate experienced distress and (b) have deficits in their social problem-solving skills that interfere with the performance of more adaptive social responses. However, objective physiological and behavioral data supporting this model are lacking. The authors compared adolescent self-injurers (n = 62) with noninjurers (n = 30) and found that self-injurers showed higher physiological reactivity (skin conductance) during a distressing task, a poorer ability to tolerate this distress, and deficits in several social problem-solving abilities. These findings highlight the importance of attending to increased arousal, distress tolerance, and problem-solving skills in the assessment and treatment of NSSI.

We previously reported that psychological stress is linked to and possibly accelerates cellular aging, as reflected by tower PBMC telomerase and shortened tetomeres. Psychological stress is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), with multiple behavioral and physiological mediators. Telomere shortness has been associated with CVD, but the relationship between tow telomerase activity, a potential precursor to telomere shortening, and CVD risk factors has not been examined in humans. Here we examine whether telomere length and telomerase in leukocytes are associated with physiological signs of stress arousal and CVD risk factors in 62 healthy women. Low telomerase activity in Leukocytes was associated with exaggerated autonomic reactivity to acute mentat stress and elevated nocturnal epinephrine. Further, tow telomerase activity was associated with the major risk factors for CVD -smoking, poor lipid profile, high systolic blood pressure, high fasting glucose, greater abdominal adiposity-as well as to a composite Metabolic Syndrome variable. Telomere length was related only to elevated stress hormones (catecholamines and cortisol). Thus, we propose that low leukocyte telomerase constitutes an early marker of CVD risk, possibly preceding shortened telomeres, that results in part from chronic stress arousal. Possible cellular mechanisms by which Low telomerase may link stress and traditional risk factors to CVD are discussed. These findings may implicate telomerase as a novel and important mediator of the effects of psychological stress on physical health and disease.

As neuroscience methods begin to dominate emotion research it is critical for researchers to remember that peripheral embodiments are critical to understanding emotional experience and emotion–behavior links. Much of modern emotion research assumes reliable mind–body connections that suggest that changes in emotional states influence bodily responses and, vice versa, that somatovisceral information shapes emotional experiences. However, there may be important qualifications to the link between the mind and the (peripheral) body. For example, the ability to sense internal and external bodily states declines in older age as does activation of physiological systems, all of which may contribute to an impairment in emotional experiences and how emotions influence behavior. I describe this phenomenon as maturational dualism and suggest implications of this for emotion in older adults.

Anticipating a stressor elicits robust cardiovascular and affective responses. Despite the possibility that recovery from these responses may have implications for physical and mental well-being, little research has examined this issue. In this study, participants either gave a public speech or anticipated giving a speech. Compared with speech-givers, participants who anticipated giving a speech, on average, exhibited similar cardiovascular recovery (decreased heart rate [HR] and increased respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]), and reported lower negative affect during recovery. Only in the anticipation condition, however, were cardiovascular recovery and affective recovery associated: poor affective recovery predicted incomplete HR recovery and decreased RSA. These are the first data to compare explicitly recovery from anticipation of a stressor with recovery from the stressor itself. These findings suggest that failing to recover from anticipation has unique physiological costs that, in turn, may contribute to mental and physical illness.

This research examined the benefits of interpreting physiological arousal as a challenge response on practice and actual Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores. Participants who were preparing to take the GRE reported to the laboratory for a practice GRE study. Participants assigned to a reappraisal condition were told arousal improves performance, whereas control participants were not given this information. We collected saliva samples at baseline and after the appraisal manipulation, which were then assayed for salivary alpha amylase (sAA), a measure of sympathetic nervous system activation. Reappraisal participants exhibited a significant increase in sAA and outperformed controls on the GRE-math section. One to three months later, participants returned to the lab and provided their score reports from their actual GRE. Again, reappraisal participants scored higher than controls on the GRE-math section. These findings illuminate the powerful influence appraisal has on physiology and performance both in and out of the laboratory.

Three studies tested the hypothesis that negative metacognitive interpretations of anxious arousal under stereotype threat create cognitive deficits in intellectually threatening environments. Study 1 showed that among minority and White undergraduates, anxiety about an intelligence test predicted lower working memory when participants were primed with doubt as compared to confidence. Study 2 replicated this pattern with women and showed it to be unique to intellectually threatening environments. Study 3 used emotional reappraisal as an individual difference measure of the tendency to metacognitively reinterpret negative emotions and found that when sympathetic activation was high (indexed by salivary alpha-amylase), women who tended to reappraise negative feelings performed better in math and felt less self-doubt than those low in reappraisal. Overall, findings highlight how metacognitive interpretations of affect can undermine cognitive efficiency under stereotype threat and offer implications for the situational and individual difference variables that buffer people from these effects.

A growing body of research has demonstrated the importance of intergroup contact in reducing fear, threat and anxiety in intergroup domains. Here we focus on the regulatory benefits of intergroup contact. We hypothesized that past intergroup contact would facilitate recovery from a stressful intergroup evaluation. White and Black participants completed a stressful evaluative task in the presence of two White or two Black interviewers while autonomic nervous system and hormonal responses were assessed. When examining how participants recovered after the stressful task, intergroup contact predicted faster physiological recovery for both autonomic and neuroendocrine reactivity. The importance of recovery from stress for physiological resilience in diverse contexts is discussed.

The authors examined White and Black participants' emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses to same-race or different-race evaluators, following rejecting social feedback or accepting social feedback. As expected, in ingroup interactions, the authors observed deleterious responses to social rejection and benign responses to social acceptance. Deleterious responses included cardiovascular (CV) reactivity consistent with threat states and poorer performance, whereas benign responses included CV reactivity consistent with challenge states and better performance. In intergroup interactions, however, a more complex pattern of responses emerged. Social rejection from different-race evaluators engendered more anger and activational responses, regardless of participants' race. In contrast, social acceptance produced an asymmetrical race pattern-White participants responded more positively than did Black participants. The latter appeared vigilant and exhibited threat responses. Discussion centers on implications for attributional ambiguity theory and potential pathways from discrimination to health outcomes.

Conditioning studies on humans and other primates show that fear responses acquired toward danger-relevant stimuli, such as snakes, resist extinction, whereas responses toward danger-irrelevant stimuli, such as birds, are more readily extinguished. Similar evolved biases may extend to human groups, as recent research demonstrates that a conditioned fear response to faces of persons of a social out-group resists extinction, whereas fear toward a social in-group is more readily extinguished. Here, we provide an important extension to previous work by demonstrating that this fear-extinction bias occurs solely when the exemplars are male. These results underscore the importance of considering how gender of the target stimulus affects psychological and physiological responses to out-group threat.