Background: Prayer is often used to cope with racism-related stress. Little is known about its impact on cardiovascular function.
Purpose: This study examined how prayer coping relates to cardiovascular reactivity (CVR), post-stress recovery, and affective reactivity in response to racism-related stress.
Methods: African American women (n =81; mean age=20 years) reported their use of prayer coping on the Perceived Racism Scale and completed anger recall and racism recall tasks while undergoing monitoring of systolic and diastolic blood pressure (DBP), heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), and hemodynamic measures. Prayer coping was examined for associations with CVR, recovery, and affective change scores using general linear models with repeated measures.
Results: Higher prayer coping was associated with decreased state stress and DBP reactivity during racism recall (p's<0.05) and with decreased DBP and increased HRV during racism recall recovery(p's<0.05).
Conclusions: Coping with racism by utilizing prayer may have cardiovascular benefits for African American women.