4 - (SYM 119) Chronic Minority Stress Exposure Exacerbates Daily Associations Between Microaggressions and Anxious/depressed Affect

Purpose: Sexual and gender minority individuals are at elevated risk for mood and anxiety disorders compared to heterosexual and cisgender individuals. Ecological momentary assessments studies have implicated experiences of enacted stigma (e.g., microaggressions) by linking these experiences with elevations in anxious and depressed affect. Drawing from a theory from the broader stress and affect literature (stress reactivity) and the psychological mediation framework, we propose that chronic enacted stigma exposure may amplify individual’s negative affective reactions to acute experiences of enacted stigma at the daily level as a result of the depletion of coping resources by chronic enacted stigma exposure. We also aimed to determine whether this increased stress reactivity was specific to acute experiences of enacted stigma or generalized to acute stressors unrelated to one’s marginalized identities (i.e., general stressors).

Methods: We used data from a 30-day ecological momentary assessment study with 429 sexual minority women and gender diverse sexual minority individuals to determine whether concurrent and prospective event-level associations between enacted stigma, anxious/depressed affect, and perceived coping efficacy were moderated by chronic enacted stigma exposure.

Results: Results demonstrate that individuals with moderate to high chronic stigma exposure experience larger increases in anxious/depressed affect and larger decreases in perceived coping efficacy following daily experiences of enacted stigma. Further, these effects of daily stigma on anxious/depressed affect persist for longer among individuals with high chronic stigma exposure. Interestingly, chronic stigma exposure did not moderate associations between daily general stressors and affect or perceived coping efficacy, suggesting that these effects are specific to stigma-related stressors.

Conclusions: Study findings indicate that the accumulation of experiences of enacted stigma may not only directly contribute to high average anxious/depressed affect but may also amplify the negative effects of future experiences of enacted stigma. This dual effect of cumulative enacted stigma exposure may ultimately have profound negative effects of the mental health and well-being of sexual and gender minority individuals as the accumulation of enacted stigma continues over time further heightening reactivity to subsequent experiences of enacted stigma. This highlights the need for interventions that may help to buffer these effects.