Camara Jules P. Harrell (born November 19, 1949), also known as Jules P. Harrell, is a professor of psychology at Howard University and a researcher in the field of the effects of stress and racism on the health of African Americans.
Jules Harrell was born on November 19, 1949 in Helena, Montana. [1] Harrell attended Carroll College and earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [1]
Harrell has been a professor of clinical psychology at Howard University for 30 years. [1] In 2008, Harrell won the Exemplary Mentoring Award from Howard University's Faculty Senate. [2] Harrell's research interests include psychometrics and psychology of racism, personality theories, assessment, and research, and psychophysiology. [1] Much of Harrell's research examines the effect of racism as a stressor to African Americans, resulting in poorer health. [3]
Harrell's 1999 book, Manichean Psychology: Racism and the Minds of People of African Descent, underscores the psychological detriments of racism on African Americans. [4] An article of Harrell's, "Multiple pathways linking racism to health outcomes," shows that racism causes poor health through cognitive, neural, affective, and prenatal pathways. [5] The article serves as a call to action for policymakers to remedy structural racism. [5] Other research of Harrell's studies the different coping strategies employed by families of children with sickle cell disease. [6]
Stress management is a wide spectrum of techniques and psychotherapies aimed at controlling a person's level of stress, especially chronic stress, usually for the purpose of and for the motive of improving everyday functioning. Stress produces numerous physical and mental symptoms which vary according to each individual's situational factors. These can include a decline in physical health, such as headaches, chest pain, fatigue, and sleep problems, as well as depression. The process of stress management is named as one of the keys to a happy and successful life in modern society. Life often delivers numerous demands that can be difficult to handle, but stress management provides a number of ways to manage anxiety and maintain overall well-being.
Social support is the perception and actuality that one is cared for, has assistance available from other people, and most popularly, that one is part of a supportive social network. These supportive resources can be emotional, informational, or companionship ; tangible or intangible. Social support can be measured as the perception that one has assistance available, the actual received assistance, or the degree to which a person is integrated in a social network. Support can come from many sources, such as family, friends, pets, neighbors, coworkers, organizations, etc.
The social determinants of health (SDOH) are the economic and social conditions that influence individual and group differences in health status. They are the health promoting factors found in one's living and working conditions, rather than individual risk factors that influence the risk for a disease, or vulnerability to disease or injury. The distributions of social determinants are often shaped by public policies that reflect prevailing political ideologies of the area.
Race and health refers to how being identified with a specific race influences health. Race is a complex concept that has changed across chronological eras and depends on both self-identification and social recognition. In the study of race and health, scientists organize people in racial categories depending on different factors such as: phenotype, ancestry, social identity, genetic makeup and lived experience. "Race" and ethnicity often remain undifferentiated in health research.
Occupational health psychology (OHP) is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health and safety of workers. OHP addresses a number of major topic areas including the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, work-family balance, workplace violence and other forms of mistreatment, psychosocial workplace factors that affect accident risk and safety, and interventions designed to improve and/or protect worker health. Although OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational psychology, for a long time the psychology establishment, including leaders of industrial/organizational psychology, rarely dealt with occupational stress and employee health, creating a need for the emergence of OHP. OHP has also been informed by other disciplines, including occupational medicine, sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as well as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is thus concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that exposure to long working hours causes an estimated 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke in 2016, mediated by occupational stress.
In psychology, Posttraumatic growth (PTG) is a concept describing positive psychological change experienced as a result of struggling with highly challenging, highly stressful life circumstances. These circumstances represent significant challenges to the adaptive resources of the individual, and pose significant challenges to the individual's way of understanding the world and their place in it. Posttraumatic growth involves "life-changing" psychological shifts in thinking and relating to the world and the self, that contribute to a personal process of change, that is deeply meaningful.
In psychology, avoidance coping is a coping mechanism and form of experiential avoidance. It is characterized by a person's efforts, conscious or unconscious, to avoid dealing with a stressor in order to protect oneself from the difficulties the stressor presents. Avoidance coping can lead to substance abuse, social withdrawal, and other forms of escapism. High levels of avoidance behaviors may lead to a diagnosis of avoidant personality disorder, though not everyone who displays such behaviors meets the definition of having this disorder. Avoidance coping is also a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder and related to symptoms of depression and anxiety. Additionally, avoidance coping is part of the approach-avoidance conflict theory introduced by psychologist Kurt Lewin.
Black psychology, also known as African American psychology and African/Black psychology, is a scientific field that focuses on how people of African descent know and experience the world. The field, particularly in the United States, largely emerged as a result of the lack of understanding of the psychology of Black people under traditional, Westernized notions of psychology. Overall, the field combines perspectives from both Black studies and traditional psychology encapsulating a range of definitions and approaches while simultaneously proposing its own framework of understanding.
In psychology, stress is a feeling of emotional strain and pressure. Stress is a type of psychological pain. Small amounts of stress may be beneficial, as it can improve athletic performance, motivation and reaction to the environment. Excessive amounts of stress, however, can increase the risk of strokes, heart attacks, ulcers, and mental illnesses such as depression and also aggravation of a pre-existing condition.
Minority stress describes high levels of stress faced by members of stigmatized minority groups. It may be caused by a number of factors, including poor social support and low socioeconomic status; well understood causes of minority stress are interpersonal prejudice and discrimination. Indeed, numerous scientific studies have shown that when minority individuals experience a high degree of prejudice, this can cause stress responses that accrue over time, eventually leading to poor mental and physical health. Minority stress theory summarizes these scientific studies to explain how difficult social situations lead to chronic stress and poor health among minority individuals.
Social stress is stress that stems from one's relationships with others and from the social environment in general. Based on the appraisal theory of emotion, stress arises when a person evaluates a situation as personally relevant and perceives that they do not have the resources to cope or handle the specific situation. The activation of social stress does not necessarily have to occur linked to a specific event, the mere idea that the event may occur could trigger it. This means that any element that takes a subject out of their personal and intimate environment could become a stressful experience. Situation that makes them socially incompetent individuals.
Pediatric psychology is a multidisciplinary field of both scientific research and clinical practice which attempts to address the psychological aspects of illness, injury, and the promotion of health behaviors in children, adolescents, and families in a pediatric health setting. Psychological issues are addressed in a developmental framework and emphasize the dynamic relationships which exist between children, their families, and the health delivery system as a whole.
Bob G. Knight, is the former associate dean of the USC Davis School of Gerontology, the Merle H. Bensinger Professor of Gerontology and Psychology and the director of the Tingstad Older Adult Counseling Center. He is best known for research and theory development on cross-cultural issues in stress and coping during family caregiving for dementia and also for theory and scholarship on adapting psychotherapy for work with older adults.
The Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) provides clinicians and researchers access to reliable, valid, and flexible measures of health status that assess physical, mental, and social well–being from the patient perspective. PROMIS measures are standardized, allowing for assessment of many patient-reported outcome domains—including pain, fatigue, emotional distress, physical functioning and social role participation—based on common metrics that allow for comparisons across domains, across chronic diseases, and with the general population. Further, PROMIS tools allow for computer adaptive testing, efficiently achieving precise measurement of health status domains with few items. There are PROMIS measures for both adults and children. PROMIS was established in 2004 with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as one of the initiatives of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research.
Emotional approach coping is a psychological construct that involves the use of emotional processing and emotional expression in response to a stressful situation. As opposed to emotional avoidance, in which emotions are experienced as a negative, undesired reaction to a stressful situation, emotional approach coping involves the conscious use of emotional expression and processing to better deal with a stressful situation. The construct was developed to explain an inconsistency in the stress and coping literature: emotion-focused coping was associated with largely maladaptive outcomes while emotional processing and expression was demonstrated to be beneficial.
Suzanne C. Segerstrom is a Professor of Psychology and biostatistician at the University of Kentucky. She is known for her clinical research on optimism and pessimism in relation to health, stress, and general well-being.
Andrew Patrick Arthur Steptoe is a British psychologist and epidemiologist and Head of the Department of Behavioural Science and Health at University College London. He is a pioneer in health psychology and behavioural medicine in the UK and internationally, known for his work on psychosocial factors in cardiovascular disease, ageing, and positive wellbeing and health.
Georgia Mae Dunston is a professor of human immunogenetics at Howard University and founding director of the National Human Genome Center at Howard University.
Mia A. Smith-Bynum a clinical psychologist who specializes in family science and is known for her research on mental health, parenting, family interactions, communication, and racial-ethnic socialization in ethnic minority families. Smith-Bynum is Associate Professor of Family Science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland-College Park, where she is also affiliated with the Maryland Population Research Center. She is Chair of the Black Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development.
Roland Boyd Scott was an American researcher, pediatrician and authority on sickle cell disease. Scott authored a key paper in 1948 describing the incidence of sickle cell in infants that eventually led to the establishment of routine screening for newborns. He established the Howard University Center for Sickle Cell Disease. He was chairman of the pediatrics department at Howard University. He lobbied Congress to pass the Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act of 1971. He authored over 250 academic publications on allergy, growth and development, and sickle cell disease.