Yara Mekawi

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at University of Louisville

Scholars have proposed 2 separable dimensions of racial colorblind ideology: the first is centered on "not seeing color" (i.e., color evasion), and the second is centered on denying racism (i.e., power evasion). Yet, to date, there is no psychometric evidence for this distinction. In this article, we aim to fill this gap by establishing the presenc...

Background The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) is commonly used to assess dimensions of emotion dysregulation, including emotion nonacceptance, limited strategies, and difficulty with goal‐directed behavior, impulse control, and emotional clarity. Despite considerable work examining the DERS' factor structure, reliability, and valid...

The longstanding issue of extrajudicial police shootings of racial and ethnic minority members has received unprecedented interest from the general public in the past year. To better understand this issue, researchers have examined racial shooter biases in the laboratory for more than a decade; however, shooter biases have been operationalized in m...

Despite a growing body of research documenting the negative impact of racial microaggressions on racial and ethnic minorities’ wellbeing, there remains debate in society about whether it is acceptable to say racially microaggressive statements. However, no scale exists to assess attitudes about the acceptability of saying such statements. Objective...

Additional research is needed on the link between racial discrimination and depressive symptoms over time as well as the risk and resilience moderators that influence this link. One understudied factor that may exacerbate this link is perseverative cognition—chronic activation of stress-related cognitive representations. However, race-specific acti...

Aims: To estimate polygenic and polygene x environment contributions to alcohol consumption and problems in the context of childhood maltreatment and lifetime trauma. Design: Main and interaction effects models predicting alcohol consumption and problems were estimated using multiple linear regression. Covariates included age, sex, education, emplo...

A great deal of research on underrepresented minority and women faculty focuses on individual-level microaggressions and other experiences or on department- and discipline-specific problems, such as chilly climates, unequal faculty searches and workloads, and epistemic exclusion within departments. Other research demonstrates campus-wide marginaliz...

Objective: Racism plays a deleterious role in Black Americans’ mental health, yet little is known about the mechanisms through which racism may confer risk to mental health outcomes. One hypothesized yet untested mechanism through which racism may lead to negative mental health is increased attention bias to threat. Even less is known about individ...

Low-income, urban-dwelling Black adults are disproportionately affected by traumatic experiences, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and depression and encounter inequities in treatment access. In addition to the benefits Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for depression, there is preliminary evidence of successful symptom reduction in...

Previous research has found that both racism and sexual assault are related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and chronic pain. Black women have unique relationships to these stressors situated within contexts of oppression, and little is known about factors that may exacerbate these associations among Black women. Among Black women...

Objective Although race-related stress is associated with numerous mental health outcomes, no previous research has examined associations with ADHD symptoms. We examine how such associations differ in Black Americans based on racial identity to allow for more nuanced understandings of racial discrimination’s association with ADHD symptoms. Methods...

Aggression is a costly public health problem with severe and multi‐faceted negative consequences and thus, identifying factors that contribute to aggression, particularly in understudied populations, is necessary to develop more effective interventions to reduce the public health cost of aggression. The goal this study was to test whether difficult...

Black pregnant and postpartum individuals are at risk for intimate partner violence (IPV), and those with a history of childhood maltreatment and IPV are even more likely to be re-victimized during pregnancy. However, it is unknown if specific types of child maltreatment predict later IPV with and without a weapon better than others. The current st...

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) offers promise as a group-based intervention to alleviate posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression symptoms in traumatized Black adults. Given the high level of barriers that exist for low-income Black adults, virtual delivery of MBCT may be helpful. This pilot randomized controlled trial assess...

Although aggression occurs across a range of disorders, associations between dimensions of psychopathology and self‐ and other‐directed aggression are not well understood. Investigating associations between psychopathology dimensions and aggression helps further understanding about the etiology of aggression, and ultimately, can inform intervention...

Background: Race-related stress negatively impacts the mental health of Black Americans to a greater degree than other racialized groups. Additionally, trauma exposure is associated with more severe levels of posttraumatic stress disorder for individuals who also experience race-related stress. Therefore, an accurate assessment of race-related stre...

Objective People living with HIV (PLWH) experience high rates of childhood maltreatment, which increases risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Thus, it is important to understand how HIV status interacts with childhood maltreatment to influence PTSD symptom severity and underlying psychophysiology. Methods The current study assessed wheth...

In the United States, racism is theorized to exert its negative effects on Black individuals’ mental health by triggering a response known as “race‐based traumatic stress” (RBTS), a multidimensional construct comprising seven clusters of symptoms that can occur following exposure to race‐based traumatic events (e.g., racial discrimination, racist i...

In response to highly publicized instances of overt racial injustice, there has been a recent resurgence of interest and commitment to identifying processes through which anti‐racist behaviors develop among White individuals. One particularly important context in which anti‐racist behaviors can develop is within families and as a result of childrea...

African American women have been protected against death by suicide, and it is important to determine factors that protect against suicide in this population. Racial identity, which shapes African Americans’ self-concept, may cultivate facets of well-being among African American women. We investigated the relations among racial identity profiles an...

Introduction Depressive and mixed symptoms in bipolar disorder (BD) have been linked to higher suicide risk. Based on Klonsky and May's three‐step theory and Joiner's Interpersonal Psychological Theory of Suicide, we hypothesized that patients diagnosed with BD who reported severe levels of depressive symptoms and mixed depressive and manic symptom...

Experiencing racism is linked to lower subjective social status (SSS), defined as one's perception of their position in society. SSS is influenced by power, prestige, and objective socioeconomic status (SES). Previous findings suggest that race-related stress may be related to adverse mental health outcomes through SSS in Black Americans, a populat...

Background: Moral injury references emotional and spiritual/existential suffering that may emerge following psychological trauma. Despite being linked to adverse mental health outcomes, little is known about the neurophysiological mechanisms of this phenomenon. In this study, we examined neural correlates of moral injury exposure and distress usin...

Appraisal of trauma is a critical factor in the development of impairing post-traumatic stress symptoms, such as dissociation. Individuals may appraise trauma as morally injurious (i.e., moral injury exposure [MIE]) and experience subsequent moral distress related to this exposure (i.e., moral injury distress [MID]). To date, however, investigation...

Objective: Racism is a multifaceted system of oppression that disproportionately harms Black mothers and children across the lifespan. Despite reliable evidence that racism is associated with worse mental health outcomes (eg, increased depressive symptoms), less is known about potentially intergenerational effects of Black mothers' experiences of...

In the current study, we investigated the emergence of racial-identity latent profiles and the potential for racial-identity profiles to moderate the relationship between race-related stress and trauma symptoms in nontreatment-seeking, trauma-exposed, Black American women ( N = 222). Racial-identity profiles emerged from latent profile analyses and...

Black Americans living in urban environments are disproportionately impacted by posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Both racial discrimination and neighborhood poverty are factors that contribute to this health disparity. However, studies focused on the intersection of these two oppressive systems on PTSD symptoms are lacking. To address this gap...

Objective: A major limitation of current suicide research is the lack of power to identify robust correlates of suicidal thoughts or behavior. Variation in suicide risk assessment instruments used across cohorts may represent a limitation to pooling data in international consortia. Method: Here, we examine this issue through two approaches: (a) an...

The properties and utility of the Primary Care PTSD Screen for DSM-5 (PC-PTSD-5) remain unstudied in community-based populations. This study evaluates the performance of the PC-PTSD-5 to determine whether it can be used as a brief alternative to the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) in a large public hospital in the southeastern United States. Parti...

The field of clinical psychological science exists within a broader field of psychology, which is increasingly acknowledged as embedded in racist and white supremacist history. In the production of clinical psychological science, the Clinical Science Model predominates as one of the most influential scientific voices that emphasizes the value of ri...

The field of clinical psychological science exists within a broader field of psychology, which is increasingly acknowledged as embedded in racist and white supremacist history. In the production of clinical psychological science, the Clinical Science Model predominates as one of the most influential scientific voices that emphasizes the value of ri...

Adverse social exposures (ASEs) such as low income, low educational attainment, and childhood/adult trauma exposure are associated with variability in brain region measurements of gray matter volume (GMV), surface area (SA), and cortical thickness (CT). These CNS morphometries are associated with stress-related psychiatric illnesses and represent e...

Research identifying the biobehavioral processes that link threat exposure to cognitive alterations can inform treatments designed to reduce perpetration of stress-induced aggression. The present study attempted to specify the effects of relatively predictable versus unpredictable threat on two attention networks, attentional alerting and executive...

Objective: There is support for the use of mindfulness-based approaches with trauma-exposed adults. However, limited data are available on feasibility and acceptability of group-based mindfulness interventions in urban medical clinics serving primarily Black adults with low socioeconomic resources, where rates of trauma exposure are high. The prese...

Background Emotion dysregulation (ED) is a heterogenous, multi-dimensional transdiagnostic risk factor relevant to the development and maintenance of both internalizing and externalizing psychopathology, especially for those who have experienced trauma. The goals of the current study were to use person-centered analyses to identify distinct profile...

Background Moral injury exposure (MIE) and distress (MID) may indirectly affect the relationship between trauma exposure and alterations in autonomic regulation [assessed via high-frequency heart rate variability (hfHRV)] in civilians, but this has not been tested in prior research. We conducted two exploratory studies to examine trauma types' asso...

Black women in the United States (U.S.) are faced with unrelenting chronic stressors that are often driven by racism and oppression to influence mental health inequities. Similar to common U.S. societal views of Black women, ideological values about Black women’s lives also permeate psychiatry and neuroscience research to prevent likely impactful r...

Background Prior findings suggest that psychopathology following interpersonal trauma or assaultive violence may present differently from prototypical posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, whether this is true for sexual trauma (ST) in the context of other salient lifetime traumatic experiences is yet unknown. We predicted that ST exposure...

Neuropsychiatry is beginning to reevaluate current research approaches in the wake of contemporary events of racialized violence against Black and other minoritized individuals. Although researchers, clinicians, and leaders have proposed reactionary personal and institutional commitments for change, many have done so without thoughtful consideratio...

Objective: African Americans living in low-income urban environments are disproportionately exposed to violence compared to other racial groups. Child exposure to community violence is linked to adverse psychological outcomes, including externalizing and internalizing behaviors. Emotion dysregulation may be one psychological process through which e...

One critical role counseling psychologists can play in dismantling anti-Blackness and eradicating systemic racism is to build on the field's strength in understanding individual-level processes (i.e., systems are created and maintained by individual actors). Drawing on antiracism scholarship, we aimed to better understand how colorblind racial ideo...

Background Racial discrimination is consistently associated with adverse health outcomes and has been linked to structural decrements in brain white matter. However, it is unclear whether discrimination-related neuroplastic changes could indirectly affect health outcomes. Our goal was to evaluate racial discrimination’s indirect associations on hea...

Adverse social exposures (ASEs) such as low income, low educational attainment, and childhood/adult trauma exposure are associated with variability in brain region measurements of grey matter volume (GMV), surface area (SA), and cortical thickness (CT). These CNS morphometries are associated with stress-related psychiatric illnesses and represent e...

Black Americans are more likely to be exposed to certain types of traumatic events and experience posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compared to other racial groups. Consequently, sound assessment of PTSD in this underserved and understudied population is necessary to develop and accurately answer research questions about etiology and interventio...

There is debate about the validity of the complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) diagnosis and whether disturbances in self-organization (DSO) in CPTSD can be differentiated from borderline personality disorder (BPD). How PTSD is defined may matter. The present study used exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) to replicate and exten...

Intimate partner violence (IPV), a significant public health problem among low-income African American women, often has negative sequelae. Despite this, many women in abusive partnerships report having meaningful lives. To advance our understanding of factors that promote resilience in this traumatized population, this investigation aimed to elucid...

Dysregulated behaviors (e.g., alcohol and drug use, aggression, self-harm, gambling, binge eating) occur frequently and can be severely costly to individuals and society. Yet, little is known about the construct of dysregulated behaviors, including (a) whether it is distinct from related constructs such as compulsive behaviors and sensation-seeking...

Research identifying the biobehavioral processes that link threat exposure to cognitive alterations can inform treatments designed to reduce perpetration of stress-induced aggression. The present study attempted to specify the effects of relatively predictable (acute) vs unpredictable (diffuse) threat on two theoretically relevant attention network...

Growing evidence suggests a positive association between perceiving racial microaggressions as acceptable and endorsing negative attitudes toward Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC). Yet, researchers have not yet examined whether it is possible to change acceptability attitudes and if so, which psychological factors may help to expl...

Objective A large body of research has shown that alcohol use, drug use, aggression, and self‐harm often co‐occur within the same individuals, suggesting the possibility of shared etiologies. Research has yet to determine the factor structure of these dysregulated behaviors. Methods Participants (Mage = 40.33; 74% women) completed self‐report and...

Background Moral injury (MI) describes emotional, spiritual, and social suffering that can arise following psychological trauma. Prior research in military pop ulations indicates the relevance of MI to adverse psychological outcomes, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicidal behaviours, and shows evidence for MI as a unique constru...

Although numerous studies have documented an association between racial discrimination and internalizing psychopathology symptoms, there is a lack of empirical work that establishes cognitive and emotional mechanisms through which racial discrimination is associated with specific transdiagnostic mental health outcomes (i.e., anxious arousal and low...

Women are at higher risk for developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compared to men, yet little is known about the biological contributors to this sex difference. One possible mechanism is differential immunological and neuroendocrine responses to traumatic stress exposure. In the current prospective study, we aimed to identify whether sex...

Objective A major limitation of current suicide research is the lack of power to identify robust correlates of suicidal thoughts or behaviour. Variation in suicide risk assessment instruments used across cohorts may represent a limitation to pooling data in international consortia. Method Here, we examine this issue through two approaches: (i) an e...

Despite significant advances in research on racial microaggressions, key challenges remain regarding how to define and classify them. Resolving these challenges is necessary to reduce misunderstanding and the subsequent minimization of racial microaggression research. Our goals in this article are to discuss the definitional challenges, to discuss...

Objective: Race-related lifetime stress exposure (LSE) including racial discrimination, trauma, and stressful life events have been shown to contribute to racial health disparities. However, little is known about associations between race-related stressors and premature biological aging that confer the risk of adverse health outcomes. Even less is...

Objectives Growing evidence of the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) warrants greater understanding of factors relevant to the relation between trait mindfulness and PTSD, such as emotion dysregulation (ED). The goal of this study was to examine associations between trait mindfulness, ED, and...

Background Experiences of racial discrimination are linked to a range of negative brain health outcomes, but little is known about how these experiences impact neural architecture, including white matter microstructure, which may partially mediate these outcomes. Our goal was to examine associations between racially discriminatory experiences and w...

There is growing evidence that general coping plays a role in the degree to which racial discrimination is associated with mental health symptoms (e.g., posttraumatic stress, depressive symptoms) for people of color. Relatively less is known about the role that race-based coping may play in the associations between racial discrimination and mental...

Reduced heart rate variability (HRV) in response to stress is a biomarker of emotion dysregulation (ED) and is related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), yet less is known about its role with dissociation in trauma-exposed adults. The goals of the current study were to examine unique patterns of associations between ED, dissociation, and PTSD...

Resilience is the process of adapting effectively to various forms of adversity, stress, or trauma such that overall levels of distress are minimized and is often assessed using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-10 (CD-RISC-10). Despite growing evidence for its use in international samples, psychometric support for this measure with African Amer...

A person-centered approach to examining trauma has uncovered typologies of polytraumatization that are differentially associated with psychopathology. However, previous research is limited by narrow conceptualizations of trauma, limited distal outcomes, and underrepresentation of racially marginalized groups. To address these gaps, we used latent p...

Despite a consistent body of work documenting associations between racial discrimination and negative mental health outcomes, the utility and validity of these findings have recently been questioned because some authors have posited that personality traits may account for these associations. To test this hypothesis in a community sample of African...

There is evidence that the more frequent, severe, and chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology experienced by Black compared to White individuals cannot be explained by disparities in socioeconomic status or trauma exposure. One factor that may be important to consider is racial discrimination, which is associated with numerous n...

Engaging in posttraumatic avoidance behaviors after a traumatic incident is associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) outcomes. Given the inherent limitations in the scope of the two‐item assessment of posttraumatic avoidance used in commonly administered measures of PTSD symptoms, the 25‐item Posttraumatic Avoidance Behaviour Questionna...

Developing psychometrically validated assessment tools to examine social and intergroup processes related to COVID-19 is fundamental for creating interventions that reduce the spread of this virus. Thus, this manuscript aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of a new measure, Assessment of COVID-19 Attitudes and Behaviors (ACAB), that assess...

Background: African Americans experience more severe and chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms compared to other racial groups, and thus it is important to examine factors that are relevant for the aetiology of PTSD in this population. Although racial discrimination has been implicated as an exacerbating factor in the development an...

Though considerable empirical work has documented the ways in which African Americans are dehumanized by other racial groups, there is no research examining how perceiving dehumanization (i.e., metadehumanization) is associated with the mental health of African Americans. In this study, we examined the indirect effect of racial discrimination on de...

Background Knowledge of how drinking motives are differentially associated with alcohol use (e.g., frequency, quantity) and drinking problems is critical in understanding risky drinking and the development of alcohol use disorder. The purpose of this paper was to use meta‐analytic techniques to answer 2 overarching questions: (a) Which types of dri...

The Africultural Coping Systems Inventory (ACSI) assesses African Americans’ culturally relevant stress coping strategies. Although its factor structure, reliability, and validity of the scores have been examined across ethnic groups of African descent persons, psychometric properties have not been investigated in an African American clinical sampl...

Objective There is a significant overlap in the motivations for nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) and alcohol use. Moreover, several theories would predict that more frequent alcohol use is likely associated with more NSSI engagement. Still, the size and direction of this association has not been well documented in the literature. Method To address t...

Despite increasing rates of suicidality among African American women, relatively little is known about culturally-specific factors relevant to their suicidality. Thus, our objectives were to: (1) determine whether previously-identified racial identity profiles replicated in a clinical sample of African American women and (2) examine whether profile...

Individuals with bipolar disorder are at increased risk of dying by suicide compared to healthy controls and those with unipolar depression. Previous studies show that depressive symptoms and mixed episodes of mania and depression are related to suicide. However, most of these studies adopt a variable‐centered approach to understanding how specific...

Highlights Opposition to sexual and gender minority (SGM) rights persists in the United States. Christian conservatism and political conservatism are linked to opposition to SGM rights. In this study, support for Christian hegemony helped to explain this link. Our results suggest that a system of Christian power and privilege is a barrier to SGM ri...

The study explored associations among childhood abuse, post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), and alcohol misuse in a sample of low-income African-American women (N = 172). Using bootstrapping techniques, a mediation effect was found of childhood physical and emotional abuse on alcohol misuse via PTSS symptom severity, avoidance, and hyperarousal,...

Background: Attentional bias is linked to a range of mood disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The present study examined attention bias patterns in African American children exposed to trauma, in order to better understand potential risk factors for PTSD. Methods: 31 children (ages 8-14) completed an eye-tracking task to a...

Highlights This study examines the association between racial colorblindness and inaction to address prejudice. We conceptualized colorblindness as a type of legitimizing ideology that maintains inequality. Affective variables helped to explain the links between colorblindness and action. Such links function similarly across White, Underrepresented...

Biased processing of threatening stimuli, including attention toward and away from threat, has been implicated in the development and maintenance of PTSD symptoms. Research examining theoretically-derived mechanisms through which dysregulated processing of threat may be associated with PTSD is scarce. Negative affect, a transdiagnostic risk factor...

Dehumanization, defined as the psychological process through which others are perceived as being non-human, has been of interest to researchers for many years, in part because of its potential to inform our understanding of how human beings justify harm toward out-groups. The current research extends the literature by using a novel experimental man...

As laws expanding the accessibility of marijuana proliferate, it is increasingly important to understand how various motivations for use are differentially associated with marijuana use (e.g., frequency, quantity) and problems associated with marijuana use (e.g., reduced productivity, relationship conflict, legal issues). We conducted a meta-analyt...

Scientific and lay theories propose that negative affect plays a causal role in problematic alcohol use. Despite this common belief, supporting experimental evidence has been mixed. Thus, the goals of this study were to (a) meta-analytically quantify the degree to which experimentally manipulated negative affect influenced alcohol use and craving i...

Many Americans endorse a colorblind racial ideology, meaning they strive to ‘‘not see race’’ and emphasize sameness and equal distribution of resources across racial lines. Currently, there is an absence of studies examining the personality and individual difference correlates of racial colorblindness. The current study investigated the association...

Objectives: The first goal was to examine whether race-related stress was associated with depression in Black immigrants, as has been found in African Americans. The second goal was to determine whether intergroup relations identity factors—Black immigrants’ shared racial fate or sense of belonging with African Americans—were related to depression,...

Objectives: A growing number of studies have documented the existence racial shooting biases against Black versus White targets (Correll et al., 2002). Little is known about individual differences that may moderate these biases. The goals of this study were to examine (a) whether White participants’ fear of racial/ethnic minorities is associated wi...

A cross-sectional qualitative descriptive design was used to examine the links among expectations about, experiences with, and intentions toward mental health services. Individual face-to-face interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 32 African American youth/mothers dyads. Content analysis revealed that positive expectations were linke...