The Lagged Effects of Racial Discrimination on Depressive Symptomology and Interactions With Racial Identity Lori S. Hoggard University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Christy M. Byrd University of California, Santa Cruz Robert M. Sellers University of Michigan Scholars agree on the negative impacts of racial discrimination on the mental health of African Americans (Brondolo et al., 2008). Yet research is needed to explore the impacts of everyday discrim- ination over time, especially compared to nonracial daily hassles, in an ecologically valid manner. It is also widely accepted that racial identity can moderate the impact of racial hassles (Sellers, Copeland- Linder, Martin, & Lewis 2006), but few studies have examined this moderating effect over time. The current study addresses gaps in the current literature by analyzing the relationship between reported racial and nonracial stressors over the course of four days. Participants were 225 college students at three institutions who participated in a 20-day daily diary study. Each day, participants reported whether they had experienced a stressful event and their depressive symptoms. We compared reports of depressive symptoms the day an event occurred and two days after for racial and nonracial stressors and examined whether racial identity served as a moderator. The results showed that individuals experienced similar increases for racial and nonracial stressors when events occur and similar decreases in the following two days. Additionally, symptom trajectories varied by racial identity. Implications for the understanding of racial discrimination’s role in the well-being of African Americans are discussed. Keywords: racial discrimination, daily diary, depressive symptoms, racial identity, African Americans A general consensus in the fields of psychology, sociology, and epidemiology is that racial discrimination (RD) is linked to dele- terious mental health outcomes for African American (AA) indi- viduals, including negative affect, distress, depression or depres- sive symptoms, anxiety, and psychiatric symptoms (Banks, Singleton, & Kohn-Wood, 2008; Brondolo et al., 2008; Paradies, 2006; Pascoe & Smart Richman, 2009; Pieterse, Todd, Neville, & Carter, 2012; Williams & Mohammed, 2009). Nevertheless, little is known about how RD contributes to mental health outcomes, particularly on a day-to-day level. Specifically, existing research is not clear on whether AAs’ responses to RD differ from their responses to nonracial stressors (Harrell, 2000). Second, it is not clear how responses to RD unfold over time and whether those trajectories are different from the trajectories of nonracial stres- sors. Third, while it is known that racial identity predicts AAs’ vulnerability to RD events (Neblett, Shelton, & Sellers, 2004; Sellers & Shelton, 2003), few researchers have examined how racial identity predicts AAs’ responses at the daily level (see Burrow & Ong, 2010, for an exception) or over time. The present study aims to expand researchers’ understanding of the impact of RD in AAs’ lives in two ways. First, using the daily diary approach, the present study comparatively examines AA college students’ mental health from the day before racial 1 and nonracial stressors occur through two days following. Second, the study examines whether racial identity attitudes moderate the daily relationship between RD and depressive symptomatology both on the day the event occurs and over time. Since RD has been consistently linked to depressive symptoms, we focus on the daily association between RD and depressive symptomatology (Brown et al., 2000; Chao, Mallinckrodt, & Wei, 2012; Gaylord-Harden & Cunningham, 2009; Klonoff, Landrine, & Ullman, 1999; Seaton & Douglass, 2014). Other studies have examined the daily impacts of RD but only focused on one day following the event (Seaton & Douglass, 2014). We follow individuals on the day preceding the event, on the day of the event, and on the two days that follow the event in an attempt to capture the ways in which RD may con- tribute to poorer mental health. The Impact of Racial Versus Nonracial Stressors Consistent with a stress and coping framework (Harrell, 2000; Sellers, Morgan, & Brown, 2001), we conceptualize RD as a stressor potentially associated with negative mental health out- comes. A number of researchers have found evidence that RD is 1 Throughout this article, we use the terms RD and racial stressors interchangeably. Lori S. Hoggard, Department of Psychology, University of North Car- olina at Chapel Hill; Christy M. Byrd, Department of Psychology, Univer- sity of California, Santa Cruz; Robert M. Sellers, Department of Psychol- ogy, University of Michigan. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Christy M. Byrd, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. E-mail: cmbyrd@ucsc.edu Journal of Counseling Psychology © 2015 American Psychological Association 2015, Vol. 62, No. 2, 216 –225 0022-0167/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cou0000069 216