Race, Gender, and Well-Being: The Paradox of Women’s Mental Health

Sarah Rosenfield, Rutgers
(4 p.m. reception; 4:30 p.m. lecture)

Drawing on cultural and social psychological approaches to stratification, this presentation explores why African Americans, especially African American women, possess similar or better mental health than whites despite facing discrimination and economic disadvantages.  Self-salience schemas are beliefs about the relative importance of the self versus others, ranging from those that highly privilege the self over others to those that strongly privilege others over the self.  The balance of high self-regard and regard for others protects individuals from a range of psychological problems, including internalizing problems of depression and anxiety and externalizing problems of anti-social behavior. Rooted in contrasting conceptions of femininity, African American women have a more balanced self-other regard than white and other groups of women, contributing to their better than expected mental health.