Dyadic discrimination and mental well-being among older Americans

Abstract Background and Objectives There is a thorough literature on the mental health consequences of discrimination exposure in adulthood, yet little work to date has situated such experiences within a relational, dyadic context. The present brief report analyzes two-wave longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS; 2018-2022) to determine whether individuals’ own or their intimate partner’s experiences of discrimination were associated with changes to anxiety symptoms, perceived stress, and/or self-esteem over a four-year period. Research Methods and Design Dyadic lagged dependent variable (LDV) models were estimated using a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework with full information maximum likelihood (FIML) methods to address missing data. A total of 1,484 individuals from 742 opposite-gender couples participated at both the 2018 and 2022 waves of data collection and comprised the analytic sample for this study. Results Individuals’ own exposure to everyday discrimination was associated with increased symptoms of anxiety and perceived stress, as well as with reduced self-esteem, over the four-year period. A dyadic partner’s exposure to everyday discrimination was associated with increased anxiety symptoms for men only, though post-hoc Wald tests failed to find a significant gender difference in effects. Discussion and Implications Discrimination is a chronic psychosocial stressor with harmful consequences for mental health of affected individuals even in mid and later life. Moreover, limited evidence suggests that discrimination may have dyadic consequences as well, though these patterns are mixed. Future research is needed to determine interpersonal mechanisms for the findings of interest.