Symposia
LGBQT+
Mark Hatzenbuehler, Ph.D.
John L Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Micah Lattanner, PhD
Post-doctoral Fellow
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Meta-analytic evidence consistently indicates that sexual minorities have significantly higher rates of psychopathology than heterosexuals (e.g., King et al., 2008). Two foundational stigma theories have been developed to explain this disparity. The minority stress theory (Meyer, 2003) proposed that the excess stressors to which lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) populations are exposed because of their stigmatized identity contribute to psychopathology. Although this theory made important advances, it did not address the specific mechanisms through which stigma-related stressors contribute to psychopathology among LGB populations. Hatzenbuehler (2009) developed the psychological mediation framework to address this gap. This framework argued that stigma-related stressors render LGB individuals more vulnerable to a variety of basic cognitive (e.g., negative self-schemas), affective (e.g., emotion dysregulation), and social (e.g., isolation) risk factors for poor mental health that in turn mediate the relationship between these stressors and psychopathology.
Accumulating evidence across a range of cross-sectional (e.g., Szymanski et al., 2014) and prospective (Sarno et al., 2020) studies, as well as lab-based paradigms (e.g., Smith et al., 2020), supports the psychological mediation framework. In this talk, we will review this evidence and present new data from a recent study that provided some of the strongest empirical evidence for the framework to date. In this study, we created a longitudinal, population-based dataset of gay men (N=371) who were assessed with validated measures of minority stress experiences (e.g., discrimination) and responses (e.g., concealment), psychosocial mechanisms (i.e., emotion regulation deficits, social risk factors), and depressive symptoms at baseline, six months, and 1 year. Both emotion dysregulation and impaired social relationships mediated the prospective relationship between minority stress experiences and depressive symptoms, controlling for initial symptoms. Additionally, there was partial evidence for a serial indirect effect linking minority stress experiences and depressive symptoms via both minority stress responses (i.e., internalized stigma) and the psychosocial mediators.
Together, this triangulation of evidence across numerous research designs and samples points to potential targets for psychosocial interventions aimed at reducing the negative mental health sequelae of stigma-related stress among sexual minorities.