This psychological mediation framework is based on two lines of research. General stress models have identified stress-initiated psychological processes that may lead to mental health problems. For instance, the stress process model (Pearlin, Lieberman, Menaghan, & Mullan, 1981) has identified two “mediating resources,” coping and social support, that people utilize in order to attenuate the effects of stressful life events. A more recent model linking chronic stress to health problems in youth (Repetti, Taylor, & Seeman, 2002) proposes that the stress of growing up in a “risky” family environment leads to negative health outcomes in part through psychological pathways involving poor social competence and emotion regulation. Taken together, although these two models focus on somewhat different stressors, they both contend that stress initiates a cascade of responses that directly and indirectly lead to mental health problems. Although researchers have recognized that discrimination creates differential exposures to stress that may account for group disparities in mental health (e.g., Meyer, 2003; Pearlin, Schieman, Fazio, & Meersman, 2005), there are currently no models that explicate the general psychological processes through which social stressors
