# Racial Stigma and Substance Use Vulnerability Among African American Young Adults: Examining Cognitive and Affective Mechanisms

> **NIH NIH K08** · UNIV OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK · 2022 · $168,668

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
The current application aims to address racial/ethnic disparities in health experienced by African
American young adults through the isolation of acute cognitive and affective mechanisms in the
linkages between racial stigma, stress, and vulnerability to substance use. The extant literature
provides critical observations of the link between self-reported racial discrimination and real-
world risk behavior among African Americans. However, cognitive-neuroscience paradigms
have been underutilized thus limiting our understanding of core cognitive and affective
processes that underlie stress reactivity, recovery, and behavior in the immediate context of a
racial stigma event—as well as factors that may amplify or mitigate acute effects. To address
this need, we build on the cue reactivity and substance use literature to develop a racial-stigma,
cue-focused task to drive event-related designs for assessing stigma-related change in brain
systems involved in cue reactivity, executive function, and reward processing. This work has the
potential to shed new light on (a) cognitive and affective processing of singular events of racial
stigma (Aim 1) (b) how racial-stigma stress produces sustained changes in affective and
regulatory processes (Aim 2) and (c) risk and resilience-promoting factors that moderate these
processes (Aim 3). In the proposed K08 career development plan, the Candidate will undertake
training to acquire core skills in cognitive-neuroscience approaches, based on
electroencephalographic (EEG) event-related potential (ERP) measures, to assess underlying
mechanisms of the stigma-stress-substance use pathway. These include conventional time-
domain approaches (e.g. late positive potential; LPP), joint time-frequency EEG/ERP analysis of
regional neural activation in amplitude (e.g. medial-frontal theta and centro-parietal delta), and
how neurophysiological activity is coordinated into dynamic functional networks using time-
frequency phase-synchrony approaches. Further, the Candidate will learn to utilize these
approaches to index constructs that are consistent with emerging measurement domain
frameworks, namely Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which offer a heuristic for representing
complex neurobiological systems. The RDoC constructs of focus are of key relevance to
substance use and include negative valence and positive valence systems (affective) as well as
cognitive control (regulatory). The utilization of cognitive-neuroscience measures and mapping
to RDoC constructs will allow for the parsing of core cognitive and affective processes, enhance
theoretical clarity and predictive utility of racial-adversity stress in the context of risk behavior,
and ultimately provide more parsimonious intervention targets.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10371350
- **Project number:** 1K08DA053441-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIV OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK
- **Principal Investigator:** Cristina Maria Risco
- **Activity code:** K08 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $168,668
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-09-01 → 2027-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10371350

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10371350, Racial Stigma and Substance Use Vulnerability Among African American Young Adults: Examining Cognitive and Affective Mechanisms (1K08DA053441-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10371350. Licensed CC0.

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