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Gender Differences in Mental Health: The Mediating Role of Perceived Personal Discrimination
Author(s) -
Dambrun Michaël
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2007.00202.x
Subject(s) - psychology , psychological distress , mental health , distress , mediation , clinical psychology , personal distress , mental distress , scale (ratio) , social psychology , psychiatry , physics , quantum mechanics , political science , law
Why is women's mental health inferior to that of men? This study hypothesized that women's mental health is not as good as men's because women perceive more personal discrimination. It was confirmed that women obtained higher scores than did men on a subjective scale of psychological distress. Additionally, women perceived greater personal and group discrimination than did men. Perceived personal discrimination proved to be the more robust predictor of psychological distress. This was evident when results of a mediation analysis revealed that gender differences in subjective distress were mediated by the measure of perceived personal discrimination, but not by the measure of group discrimination.