Nyasha Grayman-Simpson

Wisdom Counseling - Baltimore LLC

This qualitative study examined subjective perceptions of personal rewards associated with Black community involvement. A purposeful community sample of 50 adults of African descent congregated within the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States offered written responses to the question, "What, if any, are the personal rewards/benefits associated w...

This chapter presents results of a meta-ethnographic study of the coping strategies employed by Africana women in response to traumatic life events. Interest in this work emerged out of the first author’s reflections on her own coping with the sudden death of her son, Isaiah in 2010. Common strategies included reliance on: (1) Spirituality, (2) Sis...

Twenty years after publication of the Communalism Scale by Boykin, Jagers, Ellison, and Albury, this work reports on the scale's current cultural validity. The investigation relied on responses from an ethnically and regionally diverse community sample of Black adults in the United States. Results suggest that a revised two-factor 18-item scale may...

Integrating concepts from Psychodynamic Theory and Black Feminist Theory, I explore the power of the popular stereotype of Black women as Sapphires. Specifically, I discuss how relational disconnections stemming from disordered intrapsychic, interpersonal, and systemic processes, create a reinforcing cycle of Black women's oppression resulting in b...

My book project, The Committed: Life Stories of White Anti-Racist Activists, is a collaborative endeavor with more than 20 community nominated Baltimore-based White anti-racist activists. This talk explored the moral, ethical, and academic question, "What happens to a collaborative life story project when a project storyteller dies prior to project...

Notice: Published in Journal of Transformative Education June, 2019 "Courage and Critical Thinking in Diverse Communities of Transformative Education" issue https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showTocPdf?volume=17&issue=3&journalCode=jtda | Critical race courses challenge today's college students to cognitively grapple with issues of justice and t...

Critical race courses challenge today's college students to cognitively grapple with issues of justice and the good society. In some instances, these challenges lead to positive, relational growth-fostering attitudes and behaviors. Transformative learning educator Jack Mezirow's approach to facilitating cognitive shifts appears especially promising...

PPT slides from October 25, 2017 talk given at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Hosted by the Department of Mental Health.

A small body of research has begun to explore the association between faith and optimism among African Americans. However, missing from the extant work is an examination of the extent to which traditional indices of religious commitment work together with beliefs about God to shape optimism. The present study examines the utility of indices of soci...

The extant literature on the positive psychological development of African Americans is sparse, and the literature that does exist is generally ahistorical and acontextual. In our overview of scholarship on positive outcomes among African Americans, we take an interdisciplinary approach combining perspectives from cultural studies, gender studies,...

Lecture given to Faculty and Professional Staff

This article documents the transformation of cognitive and relational dispositions within a group of 14 White female undergraduate students ranging in age from 18 to 21 years and enrolled in a semester-long diversity course. Using Mezirow’s transformative learning theory as an interpretive frame to guide our phenomenological analysis of written ass...

The pivotal role of religion and spirituality in the lives of African Americans marks this ethnoracial group as a particularly important target for attention in research on the psychology and sociology of religion. In this chapter we endeavor to achieve three ends: First, we briefly review literature on meanings of religiosity and spirituality amon...

The African American helping tradition has been and continues to be instrumental to the survival and advancement of the African American community. Christian religion is integral to the maintenance of this tradition; however, surprisingly few empirical studies of the connection between religion and helping among African Americans exist. The few stu...

Previous studies of religion's role in the connection between helping and well-being among African Americans have examined this relationship from a stress and coping theoretical standpoint, perpetuating a deficit model of positive functioning. In an effort to develop the literature, the authors approached the study of these relationships from a rol...

February 18th 2012, the day of Whitney Houston’s homegoing celebration, marked the second year anniversary of the day that my infant identical twin son, Isaiah Shango, abruptly fell fatally ill in Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Consequently, for me, Whitney’s homegoing, televised lived on CNN, was a three hour grieving exerc...

This chapter summarizes the authors' reflections on positive and negative outcomes connected with intercultural tension in an international service-learning program. We start with a brief summary of our understandings of the distinctiveness of international service-learning. We then give an overview of our 2009 international service-learning progra...

This study examined use of ministers for assistance with a serious personal problem within a nationally representative sample of African Americans (National Survey of American Life—2001–2003). Different perspectives on the use of ministers—social stratification, religious socialization, and problem-oriented approach—were proposed and tested using l...

The author explored the meaning of the Black community according to a purposeful sample of 60 Black adults in the mid-Atlantic United States. Purposeful stratified sampling resulted in equal numbers of participants along the lines of locale (Brooklyn, New York; Wilmington, Delaware; and Washington, D.C.), gender, and generational affiliation (older...

The author explored the meaning of the Black community according to a purposeful sample of 60 Black adults in the mid-Atlantic United States. Purposeful stratified sampling resulted in equal numbers of participants along the lines of locale (Brooklyn, New York; Wilmington, Delaware; and Washington, D.C.), gender, and generational affiliation (older...

Contemporary social science paints a bleak picture of inner-city relational life. Indeed, the relationships of low-income, urban-residing Americans are represented as rife with distress, violence and family disruption. At present, no body of social scientific work systematically examines the factors that promote loving or selfless interactions amon...

This qualitative exploratory content analysis examined student perceptions of personal change in conjunction with their participation in an international service-learning program in South Africa. Twelve undergraduate students self-rated the extent to which they agreed that they were affected personally by their service-learning placement experience...

The literatures on the ways in which social identity and social position (e.g., gender, class, race) inform altruism have developed orthogonally. In this community-based qualitative study we use intersectionality theory to explore the complex ways in which social identity and social structures jointly influence altruism among African American adult...

This focus group study examines the use of ministerial support among African American adults with regard to (1) the issues taken to ministers by church members, (2) the issues not taken to ministers by church members, and (3) the factors that inform people's decisions about whether or not to seek ministerial support. Content analysis of narratives...

This paper is a call to Black psychologists to attend to possible psychological, social, and, cultural risk factors associated with the promotion of obesity-related disordered eating among African American women. Specifically, experiences of trauma, the Superwoman complex, limited access to resources, cultural food preferences, and the meaning of t...

African American men historically have dominated positions of public leadership in Black religious institutions, yet scholars have noted a relative absence of men from communities of worshipers. This study seeks to clarify the reasons for African American male non-attendance through a content analysis of African American men's narrative responses t...

It generally is accepted that religiosity is associated with increased optimism and decreased pessimism. However, the empirical link between religiosity and optimistic and pessimistic expectancy outcomes remains underexamined. This study explored the association between early and current organizational religiosity, subjective religiosity and spirit...