Other recent work has similarly demonstrated that challenges regulating emotion have more negative consequences for those in low SES contexts and may interact with other measures of subjective social inequality in predicting cannabis use . Together, these studies indicate that stronger emotion regulation skills  have been associated with less depression for individuals from lower, but not higher, SES. In other words, the impact of emotion regulation skills appears to be differentially impactful in relation- ship to environmental context. Similarly, examinations of emotion regulation and cannabis use reflect that the association between stressful life events/perceived stress and grow lights for cannabis use are especially elevated among individuals with less adept emotional regulation. At the same time, important potential differences among racial groups remain understudied with some studies suggesting that the implications of using putatively maladaptive emotion regulation strategies may differ across racial and ethnic groups . Indeed, within families, emotion socialization and learning emotion regulation is fundamentally linked with processes of racial socialization and helping pre- pare children for and manage emotions associated with experiences of discrimination .

While we have some sense of the relationships between social inequality and neural responses related to emotion regulation, studies examining existing racial and ethnic health disparities in this arena remain scant, in part due to serious concerns about how results may be used to further marginalize communities and reinforce stereotypes given the historic mistreatment of these groups in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience . Studies that do exist have largely been driven by outside objective metrics  with the crucial omission of experienced subjective social inequality. We still know very little about the nature of the experience of that stress and how it inter- acts with brain mechanisms in their final stage of development or what the implications may be in high-stakes health contexts, such as cannabis use. The social inequality paradox is that in their efforts to navigate one serious set of stressful risk factors , EA may actually increase their likelihood of engaging in a number of other health risk behaviors, grow cannabis including cannabis use. Not only are EA expected to face different profiles of subjective and objective social inequality, but they will also navigate those social inequality factors differently.

Specific patterns of emotion regulation in this developmental period may serve to exacerbate or mitigate risk differentially based on the social inequality context. Longitudinal approaches can help clarify how dynamic cognition-emotion interplay prospectively predicts trajectories of negative emotional experiences and cannabis use in EA . Neural maturation may allow individuals to adaptively navigate one serious set of stressful risk factors  and may also predict escalation of other health risk factors. Studying these risk factors necessitates paradigms that dissect the multi-component nature of both emotion regulation  and social inequality.We suggest that another inadvertent aftermath of EA experiences of social inequality —increased negative affect —may trigger a series of negative health sequalae including escalation of cannabis use during and following experienced subjective and objective social inequality. Understanding the dynamic developmental nature of these associations will require novel designs that combine longitudinal approaches with intensive measurement techniques that can capture both the day-to-day fluctuations and chronic effects of social inequality and substance use. Not all experiences are equal.