during sleep could reflect a heightened vigilance and a failure to ever completely relax because of the constant threat of discrimination and other dangers linked to residence in hostile residential contexts. Recent research has shown that discrimination contributes to African Americans’ failure to display the expected nocturnal decline in blood pressure (Brondolo et al. 2008a). Despite its importance, issues of vigilance have seldom been addressed in the research on discrimination. Lindström (2008) recently reported that a single-item indicator of anticipatory ethnic discrimination was associated with lower levels of psychological health in a national sample of adults in Sweden. In a study of African American youth, Clark et al. (2006) found that a measure of racism-related vigilance was inversely related to large arterial elasticity (a preclinical index of cardiovascular function) for boys but not girls. The mean age of this sample was 12 years old suggesting that the processes may begin early in life and future research should attend to the potential gendered nature of these responses.
