Vanessa Volpe

Bio

Dr. Volpe is an applied health psychologist with a focus on health equity. Broadly, she studies the ways that racism and other intersectional forms of oppression impact the stress-related health outcomes of Black people from across the African diaspora in the United States. She has a particular focus on online, technological, and structural racism contexts and processes during late adolescence and young adulthood. She employs an eclectic set of methodologies to answer research questions about health, oppression, and empowerment, from laboratory-based physiological studies to community-engaged research, encompassing quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods analytic approaches. She is currently focused on understanding the complex and dynamic ways that race- and gendered-race related experiences in online and technological environments provide both challenges to health and opportunities for liberation.

Specific research areas: Black communities, racism, stress and coping, psychophysiology, online contexts and technology, social media, strengths/protective factors, cardiovascular risk, health behaviors.

Website

https://sites.google.com/view/black-health-lab

Research Publications

Find a list of all her publications at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S1O7lfIAAAAJ Be sure to sort by year to see the most recent work.

Representative publications (publications for which she is the lead author and executor, that represent her expertise and substantive research areas): *indicates trainee

Racism and Gendered Racism; Black Women’s Health

Volpe, V. V., *Collins, A. N., Zhou, E. S., Bernard, D. L., & Smith, N. A. (2024). Online and offline gendered racial microaggressions and sleep quality for Black women. Health Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0001408

Volpe, V. V., *Collins, A. N., *Ross, J. M., Ellis, K. R., Lewis, J. A., *Ladd, B. A., & Fitzpatrick, S. L. (2024). Black young adult superwomen in the face of gendered racial microaggressions: Contextualizing challenges with acceptance and avoidance and emotional eating. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 58(5), 305-312. https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaae017

Volpe, V. V., *Ross, J. M., *Collins, A., *Spivey, B., Watson-Singleton, N. N., Goode, R., Hoggard, L. S., & Woods Giscombé, C. (2023). Gendered racial microaggressions and emotional eating for Black young adult women: The mediating roles of superwoman schema and self-compassion. Psychology of Women Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843231182913

Volpe, V. V., Katsiaficas, D., Benson, G. P., & Zelaya Rivera, S. (2020). A mixed-methods investigation of Black college-attending emerging adults’ experiences with multilevel racism. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1037/ort0000503

Volpe, V. V., Katsiaficas, D., & Neal, A. J. (2021). “Easier said than done”: A qualitative investigation of Black emerging adults coping with multilevel racism. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/cdp0000446

Race-Related and Gendered-Racial Online Experiences

Volpe, V. V., *Buhrman, G. W., *Boaheng, P., *Holliday, D., Nick, E., & Criss, S. (2023). “Speak[ing] my mind”: Reasons for using Twitter and the online experiences, critical media literacy, and racial identity of Black American emerging adults. Journal of Media Psychology.  https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000387

Volpe, V. V., *Benson, G. P., *Ross, J. M., *Briggs, A. S., *Mejía-Bradford, S. C., *Alexander, A. R., & Hope, E. C. (2023). Finding the bright side: Positive online racial experiences, racial identity, and activism for Black young adults. Computers in Human Behavior.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107738

Volpe, V. V., *Benson, G. P., & Keum, B. H.T. (2023). Tweet Stimuli Set for Content about Black People (TSS-CBP): Development and testing of stimuli to assess the impacts of online race-related content. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04471-x

Volpe, V. V., *Benson, G. P., *Czoty, L., & *Daniel, C. (2022). Not just time on social media: Experiences of online racial/ethnic discrimination and worse sleep quality for Black, Latinx, Asian, and Multiracial young adults. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-022-01410-7

Volpe, V. V., Willis, H. A., Joseph, P., & Tynes, B. M. (2020). Liberatory media literacy as protective against trauma for emerging adults of color. Journal of Traumatic Stress.  https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22640

Online and Offline Structural Racism

Volpe, V. V., Skinner O. D., Del Toro, J., *Collins, A. N., & *Mejía-Bradford, S. C. (accepted). Intersections of structural state-level racism and neighborhood deprivation on nutrition and obesity for Black adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health.

Volpe, V. V., Hoggard, L. S., Willis, H. A., & Tynes, B. M. (2021). Anti-Black structural racism goes online: A conceptual model for racial health disparities research. Ethnicity & Disease. https://doi.org/10.18865/ed.31.S1.311

Volpe, V. V., Schorpp, K., Cacace, S., Benson, G. P., & Banos, N. C. (2021). State- and provider-level racism and health care in the United States. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2021.03.008

Psychophysiology and Cardiovascular Disease Risk

Volpe, V. V., *Kendall, E. B., *Collins, A. N., *Graham, M. G., Williams, J., & Holochwost, S. J. (accepted). Prior exposure to racial discrimination and patterns of acute parasympathetic nervous system responses to a race-related stress task among Black adults. Psychophysiology. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14713

Volpe, V. V., Lee, D., Hoggard, L.S., & Rahal, D. (2019). Racial discrimination and acute physiological responses among Black young adults: The role of racial identity. Journal of Adolescent Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.09.004

Volpe, V. V., *Rahal, D., *Holmes, M., & *Zelaya Rivera, S. (2018). Is hard work and high effort always healthy for Black college students? John Henryism in the face of racial discrimination. Emerging Adulthood, 8(3), 245-252. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167696818804936

Conceptual Contributions to Equity in the Field

Volpe, V. V., Smith, N. A., Skinner, O. D., Lozada, F. T., Hope, E. C., & Del Toro, J. (2022). Centering the heterogeneity of Black adolescents’ experiences: Guidance for within-group designs among African diasporic communities. Journal of Research on Adolescence. https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12742

Volpe, V. V., Dawson, D. N., Rahal, D., Wiley, K., & Vesslee, S. (2019). Bringing psychological science to bear on racial health disparities: The promise of centering Black health through a Critical Race framework. Translational Issues in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000205