Racism's effect on depressive symptoms: Examining perseverative cognition and Black Lives Matter activism as moderators.

Additional research is needed on the link between racial discrimination and depressive symptoms over time as well as the risk and resilience moderators that influence this link. One understudied factor that may exacerbate this link is perseverative cognition-chronic activation of stress-related cognitive representations. However, race-specific activism, like Black Lives Matter (BLM) activism, may attenuate this association. Given this, the current study investigated autoregressive and cross-lagged associations between racial discrimination and depressive symptoms across two time points over 6 months. We also tested if perseverative cognition and two domains of Black Lives Matter activism-support and behavior-moderated the cross-lagged associations between racial discrimination and depressive symptoms. Using data from 232 African Americans, findings revealed a significant cross-lagged effect of Time 1 racial discrimination on Time 2 depressive symptoms (but no cross-lagged effect of T1 depressive symptoms on T2 racial discrimination). This cross-lagged effect was moderated by both perseverative cognition and support for BLM activism such that the association between Time 1 racial discrimination was only associated with Time 2 depressive symptoms at lower levels of perseverative cognition and lower levels of BLM support. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).