Resilience in the face of racial discrimination: The role of emotional acceptance.

Racial discrimination has severe adverse mental and physical health consequences for Black Americans. As such, it is critical to understand how best to help protect the health of Black Americans in the face of this stressor. The emotional burden of chronic stress represents a key pathway through which stress damages health; thus, the ability to manage this emotional burden using emotion regulation may represent a core protective factor. Racial discrimination targets individuals' identities, which may have important implications for which regulation strategies will be most helpful. We predicted that successfully using strategies that are more likely to validate individuals' experiences (e.g., emotional acceptance) may be particularly helpful. Other strategies that are less likely to validate individuals' experiences may be less helpful (e.g., cognitive reappraisal). In a sample of Black individuals (N = 504, data from 2018), the link between discrimination and multiple indices of worse health was consistently buffered for people who reported more successful use of emotional acceptance, but not for those who reported more successful use of reappraisal or suppression. These patterns were replicated in a follow-up time point predicting mental health 2 years later (N = 251). These findings underscore the crucial role of context for emotion regulation, suggesting that emotional acceptance may be a uniquely useful approach that protects the health of Black Americans by validating justified emotions in the context of racial discrimination. This work underscores a useful pathway for culturally competent psychosocial interventions for reducing anxiety, depression, and stress-related chronic illness in Black Americans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).