Objectives: Engagement in close personal ties has been shown to reduce risk for morbidity and mortality. In this study, we assess the extent to which one dimension of social relationships, mattering to others, conditions the positive relationship between age and allostatic load (AL). We do so to test the assumption that age-related declines in health are less prominent among those with high levels of mattering. Method: Poisson regression models were estimated using data from the Nashville Stress and Health Study (NSAHS). The NSAHS is a community-based study of 1,026 African American and White study participants, aged 22 to 69 years, residing in Davidson County, Tennessee. Results: Analyses revealed that mattering conditioned or modified the relationship between age and AL. Specifically, we found that AL increases with age and this increase was significantly greater among those with moderate or low perceptions of mattering to others. Discussion: This study confirms that perceptions of mattering to one’s significant others are inversely related to physical health problems. This is so because mattering captures the positive and protective aspects of these relationships.

Police maltreatment, whether experienced personally or indirectly through one's family or friends, represents a potentially harmful stressor, particularly for minority populations. We address this issue by investigating: (1) how waist circumference (WC) varies by personal and vicarious exposure to unfair treatment by police (UTBP); and (2) to what extent exposure to UTBP explains the black-white disparity in WC. We employed data collected from a community-based sample of black (n = 601) and white (n = 608) adults living in Nashville-Davidson county Tennessee to address these questions. Results from our final linear regression model showed that those who reported vicarious UTBP had WCs that were approximately 2 in. greater than those who did not (b = 2.03; p = 0.003). While personal UTBP was not linked to higher WC, a post-hoc analysis suggested that our ability to detect an association was complicated by selection. Binary mediation analysis revealed that differential exposure to vicarious UTBP accounted for approximately 12% of the black-white WC disparity among women. We found no black-white differences in WC among men. The association between vicarious UTBP and WC did not vary by age, race, or gender. Overall, our findings point toward the role of discriminatory policing as a potential upstream contributor to racial disparities in health.

This study has four objectives. First, we confirm the previously observed association between physical limitations and fear of crime. Second, we assess the role of age in this relationship. Third, we identify factors that mediate this relationship. Fourth, we assess whether this relationship is observed across racial/ethnic groups. Adjusting for perceptions of personal control and disability-related stigma reduces the magnitude of this relationship to non-significance for black and white respondents, but not for Hispanics. Also, we find that age is inversely related to fear of crime for blacks and whites.

The “cost-of-caring” thesis asserts that observed gender differences in psychological distress are largely a consequence of women’s greater emotional investment in the lives of their loved ones. Research on this topic has supported this thesis by showing that network events result in higher levels of depressive symptoms for women compared to men. However, other evidence challenges this claim. In light of these divergent findings, this paper elaborates this topic in three ways. First, susceptibility to network events is assessed in terms of two dimensions of psychological distress, depressive symptomatology and problem drinking. Second, within-gender analyses are conducted to examine the possibility that masculine and feminine personality traits condition the relationship between network events and psychological distress. Finally, this paper assesses age variation in the cost of caring. Data collected from 1,393 respondents ages 18 to 55 who participated in a Toronto-based community study are employed to address these issues. Findings reveal that the cost of caring for others extends to women and men, and that gender orientation modifies the relationship between network events and psychological distress. These results underscore the need to critically assess the social factors that differentiate risk and well-being for men and women.