5 - (IOP 26) Within-person Associations Between Minority Stressors and Mental Health: Resilience as a Moderator

Minority stress has been linked to negative mental health for all sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals, with SGM individuals assigned female at birth (SGM-AFAB) facing particularly high risk of poor mental health due to their minority stress experiences. Identifying protective factors (e.g., trait resilience) is critical to mitigating the negative mental health effects of minority stress. However, research on whether resilience buffers the effects of minority stress on mental health remains scarce. Existing studies have been overwhelmingly cross-sectional, meaning that we cannot draw causal inferences from these results, and, additionally, have yielded mixed results. To advance this research and provide more rigorous tests of these associations, we assessed the longitudinal effects of minority stress on mental health while also testing whether resilience moderates these associations in a diverse sample of SGM-AFAB individuals.

Data were drawn from six waves (2017–2021) of FAB400, a longitudinal cohort study of SGM-AFAB individuals (n = 476; M age = 21.7 years). Measures included distal (victimization, microaggressions) and proximal (internalized heterosexism, internalized cisgenderism) minority stressors, resilience, and mental health outcomes (depressive and anxiety symptoms, suicidal ideation, and problematic substance use). Using multilevel modeling in Mplus, we first ran unmoderated models testing within-person associations between each minority stressor and mental health outcome, followed by moderation models with resilience as a between-person predictor of these within-person associations. Models controlled for baseline age, race, sexual orientation, and gender.

Resilience buffered associations between all four minority stressors and suicidal ideation. It also moderated the relationships between microaggressions and both depressive symptoms and problematic alcohol use, as well as between victimization and problematic alcohol use. Specifically, resilience weakened the impact of each minority stressor on suicidal ideation, microaggressions on depressive symptoms, and victimization on problematic alcohol use. Interestingly, resilience exacerbated associations between microaggressions and problematic alcohol use.

Our findings suggest that resilience consistently serves as a protective factor against suicidal ideation for SGM-AFAB individuals, mitigating the effects of both distal and proximal minority stressors. While its protective effects were less consistent for other mental health outcomes, resilience appeared to weaken the associations between microaggressions and depressive symptoms, as well as victimization and problematic alcohol use, but exacerbated the associations between microaggressions and problematic alcohol use. These results emphasize the need for resilience-building interventions to be tailored to the unique experiences of SGM-AFAB individuals, as these interventions may be helpful in improving mental health in this group.