"White Box" Epidemiology and the Social Neuroscience of Health Behaviors: The Environmental Affordances Model.
Crucial advances have been made in our knowledge of the social determinants of health and health behaviors. Existing research on health disparities, however, generally fails to address a known paradox in the literature: While blacks have higher risk of medical morbidity relative to non-Hispanic whites, blacks have lower rates of common stress-related forms of psychopathology such as major depression and anxiety disorders. In this article we propose a new theoretical approach, the Environmental Affordances Model, as an integrative framework for the origins of both physical and mental health disparities. We highlight early empirical support and a growing body of experimental animal and human research on self-regulatory health behaviors and stress coping that is consistent with the proposed framework. We conclude that transdisciplinary approaches, such as the Environmental Affordances Model, are needed to understand the origins of group-based disparities to implement effective solutions to racial and ethnic group inequalities in physical and mental health.
Department of Epidemiology and Community Health, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA ; Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA ; Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Briana
B
Mezuk
Cleopatra M
CM
Abdou
Darrell
D
Hudson
Kiarri N
KN
Kershaw
Jane A
JA
Rafferty
Hedwig
H
Lee
James S
JS
Jackson
allostatic load; mental health; race/ethnicity; stress-buffering effects