blood pressure. This includes analyses of 3,300 middle-aged women in the MESA study (Brown et al. 2006). In a study of black and white adolescents, unfair treatment attributed to race was unrelated to ambulatory blood pressure, but unfair treatment due to physical appearance was (Matthews et al. 2005). Table 1 uses the term “conditional association” to indicate the absence of an association between discrimination and health in the overall sample, but with the existence of an association only for some sub-group. This pattern dominates the recent studies of discrimination and blood pressure. In analyses of 2,316 cases of incident hypertension in the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS, Cozier et al. 2006), although discrimination was unrelated to incident hypertension in the total sample, it was positively related among women born outside of the U.S. In the Metro Atlanta Heart Disease Study, although discrimination was unrelated to blood pressure, high levels of stress due to discrimination were predictive of increased hypertension risk (Davis et al. 2005). Moreover, some of the conditional findings are counterintuitive. For example, in studies of black adolescents, discrimination was inversely related to blood pressure only among those who responded to discrimination with a passive coping style (Clark and
