I am extremely social with everyone but his kids. I've worked in several medical clinics. Most of them had African-American populations. Now I'm working in a clinic with a majority white population. The negative emotional responses I've seen whites give to illness is of a higher degree than the black populations I've worked with.
Nasty things happen to people all the time.
I've since come to realize that it's just a different way of coping. We use empathy, you use apathy. So, to answer your question, there is no more or less problem coping. We just do it differently. I think a person's response to illness is probably related to their connection to this life.