Expanding methodologies to capture racial affect: White Americans’ emotional responses to racial injustice and White accountability

Blevins, Emily Jade

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122232 Copy

Description

Title

Expanding methodologies to capture racial affect: White Americans’ emotional responses to racial injustice and White accountability

Author(s)

Blevins, Emily Jade

Issue Date

2023-11-22

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Todd, Nathan R

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Todd, Nathan R

Committee Member(s)

• Berenbaum, Howard
• Perry, Sylvia P
• Stern, Chadly D
• Spanierman, Lisa B

Department of Study

Psychology

Discipline

Psychology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

emotion, cognitive appraisals, white supremacy, racism, intergroup emotions, affective science, critical theory, reparations

Abstract

White Americans’ emotions about race and racism are important phenomena that help to predict prejudicial behavior. Because of the connection between White Americans’ emotions and racial behavior, scholars have proposed that affective processes help to maintain White supremacy and are therefore a meaningful target of antiracist psychological research. Yet, the study of racial affect remains challenging due to limitations in measurement and conceptualization. In this study, we seek to improve how racial affect is measured in addition to examining how White college students respond emotionally to videos discussing racism and White accountability. We test whether novel measures of racial affect inspired by appraisal theory can capture changes in guilt and anger evoked by racism-related videos and whether guilt and anger mediate the effect of racism-related videos on antiracist attitudes and behaviors. We collected a sample of 364 White students at a large Midwestern university where students were assigned to one of three conditions with differing video messages. One set of videos contained morals-focused messaging (i.e., Racism is Immoral condition) which highlighted how structural racism violates shared values of justice and equal opportunity. The second set of videos contained accountability-focused messaging (i.e., Give Things Up condition), which highlighted the need for White people to give up resources to correct the imbalance created by racism. The final set of videos served as a control condition and featured the same actors discussing neutral topics. We measured students’ emotional responses to these videos in multiple ways: self-labeled emotion using a simple rating scale, guilt- and anger-related cognitive appraisals, and guilt- and anger-related action tendencies. We then engaged students in behavioral tasks to gauge their willingness to donate to antiracist causes, their support for reparations, and their willingness to self-educate about racism. We found that both sets of videos discussing racism and White accountability evoked greater guilt and anger compared to the control condition, and this was consistent for each emotion measure. Self-labeled guilt and anger were generally poor predictors of antiracist outcomes, whereas guilt- and anger-related cognitive appraisals consistently predicted both antiracist outcomes in hypothesized directions. Guilt- and anger-related action tendencies functioned similarly to cognitive appraisals in predicting antiracist outcomes. Further, we found differences in the pattern of effects between men and women and minimal differences in effects by White racial identity. Overall, this project contributes to our understanding of how emotions operate in racialized contexts and how these emotions relate to antiracist outcomes. Our findings support the use of alternative measures of racial affect beyond self-labeled emotion and suggest that anger (as defined by appraisal theory) may hinder antiracist engagement while guilt appears to promote antiracism. Implications for future research and practice are also discussed.

Graduation Semester

2023-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Emily Blevins

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