Jonathan Kunstman
Auburn University, AL·Psychology
Millions of Americans sleep poorly, which harms health and daily functioning. Racial discrimination is one known cause: it raises stress arousal, disrupts sleep and contributes to health gaps between Black and White Americans.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
racial discrimination
racism
sleep
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether daily experiences of racial discrimination increase social pain minimization (having one's emotional pain dismissed) and sleep problems in Black American adults, using ecological momentary assessment and actigraphy.
- Determine whether social pain minimization partially mediates, or helps explain, the effect of discrimination on objectively measured sleep.
- Test whether people higher in Black racial phenotypicality, appearance that activates racial stereotypes in others, experience more discrimination, worse sleep and a stronger mediating role of social pain minimization.
More about the research
Yet little is known about how discrimination damages sleep, or who is most at risk.
Why it matters
Poor sleep is linked to immune problems, heart disease, mental illness and suicidality, and racial discrimination contributes to sleep disparities. By identifying emotion invalidation as a possible pathway and appearance-based stereotyping as a risk factor, the work could point future interventions toward fostering emotional validation to protect sleep in Black Americans.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
William Copeland
University of Vermont, VT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Reassess at least 80% of Great Smoky Mountains Study participants in their early 40s with a 120-minute in-home visit covering socioeconomic status, attitudes, neurocognitive tasks and biomeasures such as blood pressure and blood spots.
Skyler Jackson
Yale University, CT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Develop a community-informed multigroup scale of border identity stress that functions equivalently across bi+, Multiracial, and gender nonbinary adults and is suited to cross-sectional, longitudinal, and ecological momentary assessment HIV research.
Robert Rosales
Brown University, RI·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Assess the acceptability and feasibility of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) measures of social stress, alcohol use and protective factors among Hispanic and white LGB youth, using cognitive interviews and a two-week pilot.
The school
Auburn University: 11 labs on PI Pages, $394M a year on research, 327 research doctorates a year.
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