Compared to European American women, African American women report more common depressive symptoms, such as sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness. Emerging research suggests that African American women’s health outcomes, like depression, may be partially explained by women’s stress-coping behaviors. African American women experience various stressors in light of their intersectional race and gender identities. To cope with these stressors, they may use culturally-sanctioned coping strategies like John Henryism and Strong Black Womanhood (SBW) schema. John Henryism is described as a behavioral predisposition to actively cope with psychosocial environmental stressors, and SBW schema refers to a multidimensional construct internalized by many African American women to overcome oppression. John Henryism and SBW schema have shown to be both beneficial and detrimental to African American women’s health. Despite this understanding, there is little research on the relationship between these coping strategies and depression in African American women. The current study examines whether John Henryism and SBW schema differentially predict depressive symptoms among African American women, using linear regression analyses. We also investigate if emotion regulation mediates the relations between John Henryism and SBW schema and depressive symptoms among African American women. This presentation will discussion our results, limitations, and proposals for future research.
