Stereotypies are frequently associated with sub-optimal captive environments and are used as welfare indicators. However, susceptibility to stereotypy can vary across individuals of the same group. As such, identifying which individuals are more susceptible to this behaviour may be helpful in managing this issue. We have investigated which sex-age class of semi-captive capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp) is more susceptible to stereotypic behaviours and evaluated whether or not they are also more affected by the social factors that typically influence and increase allostatic load. To accomplish this, we used instantaneous sampling to collect data on a group of capuchins kept on an island in an urban park in São Paulo, Brazil. We found that sub-adult males were the only sex-age class to display stereotypic behaviours and they all displayed pacing. Furthermore, 33% of sub-adult males also exhibited a second stereotypic behaviour associated with their pacing. Compared to the other sex-age classes, sub-adult males had a higher participation in social conflicts and experienced higher social isolation. Sub-adult males also demonstrated a lower level of positive social interactions. All of these factors typically increase allostatic load. We suggest that distal causation of the observed pacing behaviour would be the ecological/evolutionary need of sub-adult males to disperse from their natal group and that the proximal causation would relate to the high allostatic load from social sources. We recommend that managers of zoos and other facilities monitor changes in the social composition of captive groups and evaluate individuals’ age so that necessary alterations may be made, where appropriate, to reduce allostatic load and generate better welfare at individual and group levels.

Growth in early life is associated with various individual health outcomes in adulthood, but limited research has been done on associations with a more comprehensive measure of health. Combining information from multiple biological systems, allostatic load (AL) provides such a quantitative measure of overall physiological health. We used longitudinal data from the Birth to Twenty Plus cohort in South Africa to calculate an AL score at age 22 years and examined associations with birth weight and linear growth and weight gain from age 0 to 2 years and 2 to 5 years, as attenuated by trajectories of body mass index and pubertal development in later childhood and adolescence. Differences in total AL score between males and females were small, though levels of individual biological factors contributing to AL differed by sex. Increased weight gain from age 2 to 5 years among males was associated with an increased risk of high AL, but no other early-life measures were associated with AL. Increased adiposity through childhood and adolescence in females was associated with higher AL in early adulthood. These results illustrate that patterns of early-life growth are not consistently associated with higher AL. While more research is needed to link AL in young adulthood to later health outcomes, these results also suggest increased adiposity during childhood and adolescence represents a potential early sign of later physiological risk.

Social stratification is an important mechanism of human organization that helps to explain health differences between demographic groups commonly associated with socioeconomic gradients. Individuals, or group of individuals, with similar health profiles may have had different stratification experiences. This is particularly true as social stratification is a significant non-measurable source of systematic unobservable differences in both SES indicators and health statuses of disadvantage. The goal of the present study was to expand the bulk of research that has traditionally treated socioeconomic and demographic characteristics as independent, additive influences on health by examining data from the United States. It is hypothesized that variation in an index of multi-system physiological dysregulation – allostatic load – is associated with social differentiation factors, sorting individuals with similar demographic and socioeconomic characteristics into mutually exclusive econo-demographic classes. The data were from the Longitudinal and Biomarker samples of the national Study of Midlife Development in the US (MIDUS) conducted in 1995 and 2004/2006. Latent class analyses and regression analyses revealed that physiological dysregulation linked to socioeconomic variation among black people, females and older adults are associated with forces of stratification that confound socioeconomic and demographic indicators. In the United States, racial stratification of health is intrinsically related to the degree to which black people in general, and black females in particular, as a group, share an isolated status in society. Findings present evidence that disparities in health emerge from group-differentiation processes to the degree that individuals are distinctly exposed to the ecological, political, social, economic and historical contexts in which social stratification is ingrained. Given that health policies and programmes emanate from said legal and political environments, interventions should target the structural conditions that expose different subgroups to different stress risks in the first place.

In this article we seek to show that prevailing ideological viewpoints on Black health misinterpret Black behavior, and that dominant racial ideologies themselves have negative health effects on African American communities. Second, we show that public policies and practices reflecting prevailing ideological viewpoints harm African American communities. Together, these ideologies and policies undermine Black health by adversely impacting the immune, metabolic, and cardiovascular systems, fueling the development or progression of infectious and chronic disease. Third, we argue that health reform pursued within the same prevailing ideological viewpoints that misinterpret Black health problems have limited effectiveness. We argue for culturally appropriate public policies that value African American social perspectives and coping mechanisms. We suggest that substantive health reform is best pursued through a democratic movement that challenges dominant ideological commitments.

Thirty years after the civil rights era, the United States remains a residentially segregated society in which Blacks and Whites inhabit different neighborhoods of vastly different quality. Given high levels of racial segregation and elevated rates of Black poverty, it is axiomatically true that African Americans will experience more neighborhood poverty than other groups. Moreover, because poverty is associated with crime and delinquency, they will also be exposed to far higher rates of social disorder and violence. In this article I argue that long-term exposure to social disorder and violence because of segregation produces a high allostatic load among African Americans, which leads, in turn, to a variety of deleterious health and cognitive outcomes. After summarizing recent research on stress and allostatic load, I specify a biosocial model of racial stratification and draw upon it to explicate well-documented racial differentials with respect to health and cognition.