Blacks' Death Rate Due to Circulatory Diseases Is Positively Related to Whites' Explicit Racial Bias.

Perceptions of racial bias have been linked to poorer circulatory health among Blacks compared with Whites. However, little is known about whether Whites' actual racial bias contributes to this racial disparity in health. We compiled racial-bias data from 1,391,632 Whites and examined whether racial bias in a given county predicted Black-White disparities in circulatory-disease risk (access to health care, diagnosis of a circulatory disease; Study 1) and circulatory-disease-related death rate (Study 2) in the same county. Results revealed that in counties where Whites reported greater racial bias, Blacks (but not Whites) reported decreased access to health care (Study 1). Furthermore, in counties where Whites reported greater racial bias, both Blacks and Whites showed increased death rates due to circulatory diseases, but this relationship was stronger for Blacks than for Whites (Study 2). These results indicate that racial disparities in risk of circulatory disease and in circulatory-disease-related death rate are more pronounced in communities where Whites harbor more explicit racial bias.

Socioeconomic Status and Social Support: Social Support Reduces Inflammatory Reactivity for Individuals Whose Early-Life Socioeconomic Status Was Low.

Low socioeconomic status (SES) during childhood confers risk for adverse health in adulthood. Accumulating evidence suggests that this may be due, in part, to the association between lower childhood SES and higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Drawing from literature showing that low childhood SES predicts exaggerated physiological reactivity to stressors and that lower SES is associated with a more communal, socially attuned orientation, we hypothesized that inflammatory reactivity would be more greatly affected by cues of social support among individuals whose childhood SES was low than among those whose childhood SES was high. In two studies, we found that individuals with lower subjective childhood SES exhibited greater reductions in pro-inflammatory cytokine reactivity to a stressor in the presence of a supportive figure (relative to conditions with an unsupportive or neutral figure). These effects were independent of current SES. This work helps illuminate SES-based differences in inflammatory reactivity to stressors, particularly among individuals whose childhood SES was low.

Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals' unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

Wealth, health, and the moderating role of implicit social class bias.

BACKGROUND: Subjective social status (captured by the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status) is in many cases a stronger predictor of health outcomes than objective socioeconomic status (SES). PURPOSE: The study aims to test whether implicit beliefs about social class moderate the relationship between subjective social status and inflammation. METHODS: We measured implicit social class bias, subjective social status, SES, and baseline levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), a marker of inflammation, in 209 healthy adults. RESULTS: Implicit social class bias significantly moderated the relationship between subjective social status and levels of IL-6, with a stronger implicit association between the concepts "lower class" and "bad" predicting greater levels of IL-6. CONCLUSIONS: Implicit social class bias moderates the relationship between subjective social status and health outcomes via regulation of levels of the inflammatory cytokine IL-6. High implicit social class bias, particularly when one perceives oneself as having low social standing, may increase vulnerability to inflammatory processes.

Clusters of CRIS scores and psychological adjustment.

Cluster analyses on racial identity attitudes as assessed with the Cross Racial Identity Scale (Vandiver et al., 2000) provided strong support for six theoretically meaningful clusters. We labeled these Afrocentric, Assimilated, Conflicted, Low Race Salience, Negative Race Salience, and Multiculturalist. We also examined whether individuals in different clusters varied on symptoms of psychological distress, as well as personal and status-based rejection sensitivity. Participants in the Conflicted cluster reported greater psychological distress and personal rejection sensitivity than those in the Multiculturalist and Low Race Salience clusters. Our findings suggest that bivariate relationships between nigrescence attitudes and psychological functioning may mask nuances that are evident with person-centered analyses. We discuss the implications of these findings for racial identity research.

Critical Faculty and Peer Instructor Development: Core Components for Building Inclusive STEM Programs in Higher Education.

First-generation college students and those from ethnic groups such as African Americans, Latinx, Native Americans, or Indigenous Peoples in the United States are less likely to pursue STEM-related professions. How might we develop conceptual and methodological approaches to understand instructional differences between various undergraduate STEM programs that contribute to racial and social class disparities in psychological indicators of academic success such as learning orientations and engagement? Within social psychology, research has focused mainly on student-level mechanisms surrounding threat, motivation, and identity. A largely parallel literature in sociology, meanwhile, has taken a more institutional and critical approach to inequalities in STEM education, pointing to the macro level historical, cultural, and structural roots of those inequalities. In this paper, we bridge these two perspectives by focusing on critical faculty and peer instructor development as targets for inclusive STEM education. These practices, especially when deployed together, have the potential to disrupt the unseen but powerful historical forces that perpetuate STEM inequalities, while also positively affecting student-level proximate factors, especially for historically marginalized students.

Cross Racial Identity Scale (CRIS) scores: stability and relationships with psychological adjustment.

We examined the structural validity, internal consistency (alpha and omega), and test-retest reliability of scores on the Cross Racial Identity Scale (CRIS; Vandiver et al., 2000 ; Worrell, Vandiver, & Cross, 2004 ), as well as the relationship between CRIS scores and several variables related to psychological adjustment. Participants consisted of several groups of African American college students (34 ≤ n ≤ 340) attending a predominantly White university in a Western state. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated an acceptable fit of the data to the theoretical model, and alpha and omega coefficients indicate that CRIS scores have moderate to high internal consistency. CRIS scores also demonstrated stability over periods between 2 and 20 months in ranges that suggest long-term stability of racial attitudes. As predicted by the expanded nigrescence model (Cross & Vandiver, 2001 ), only self-hatred attitudes had consistent, meaningful relationships with psychological adjustment.

The dynamics of coping, positive emotions, and well-being: Evidence from Latin American immigrant farmworkers and college students during a time of political strife.

In the present article, we use daily diary methodology to investigate how coping influences well-being via the engagement of positive emotions in immigrant farmworkers and university students from diverse ethnic backgrounds. In Study 1, in a sample of Latinx immigrant farmworkers (N = 76), we found that the daily use of adaptive coping strategies predicted greater daily well-being, and that this relationship was accounted for by greater daily experiences of positive emotions. In Study 2, in a sample of college students from Latinx, Asian, and European American backgrounds (N = 336), we replicated the mediating effect of positive emotionality on the effect of adaptive coping on daily well-being and extended these findings to an examination of longitudinal well-being. This work provides evidence of one mechanism by which coping affects well-being and is one of the first studies of these dynamics in Latinx samples. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Seek help from teachers or fight back? Student perceptions of teachers' actions during conflicts and responses to peer victimization.

Previous research has shown that teachers' actions when addressing conflict on school grounds can shape adolescent perceptions regarding how well the school manages victimization. Our objective in this study was to determine how these perceptions influenced the likelihood that adolescent students would react to victimization scenarios by either seeking help from school authority or physically fighting back. Vignettes describing two events of victimization were administered to 148 ethnic minority adolescents (Latino, African American, and Asian backgrounds; 49% female) attending an urban high school with high rates of conflict. Positive perceptions of teachers' actions during conflicts--assessed via a questionnaire tapping how teachers manage student conflicts both generally and in a specific instance of strife--predicted a greater willingness to seek help from school authority, which in turn negatively predicted self-reported aggressive responses to the victimization scenarios. Path analysis established the viability of this indirect effect model, even when we controlled for sex, beliefs about the acceptability of aggression, and previous levels of reactive aggression. Adolescents' perceptions of teachers' actions during conflicts are discussed in relation to social information processing models, improving student-teacher relations, and decreasing aggression at schools.

When dispositional and role power fit: implications for self-expression and self-other congruence.

Integrating and extending the literatures on social power and person-environment fit, 4 studies tested the hypothesis that when people's dispositional beliefs about their capacity to influence others fit their assigned role power, they are more likely to engage in self-expression-that is, behave in line with their states and traits-thereby increasing their likelihood of being perceived by others in a manner congruent with their own self-judgments (i.e., self-other congruence). In Studies 1-3, dispositionally high- and low-power participants were randomly assigned to play a high- or low-power role in an interaction with a confederate. When participants' dispositional and role power fit (vs. conflicted), they reported greater self-expression (Study 1). Furthermore, under dispositional-role power fit conditions, the confederate's ratings of participants' emotional experiences (Study 2) and personality traits (Study 3) were more congruent with participants' self-reported emotions and traits. Study 4's results replicated Study 3's results using an implicit manipulation of power and outside observers' (rather than a confederate's) ratings of participants. Implications for research on power and person perception are discussed.

Personality and racial/ethnic relations: a perspective from Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS) Theory.

The five articles in this special section examine personality and racial/ethnic relations from the perspective of Mischel and Shoda's Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS) Theory. In this introductory piece, we first provide a primer on CAPS theory. In particular, we try to highlight the role that context plays in the construction and manifestation of personality as well as the dynamic ways that people interpret and react to input from their environment. We then review research on race-based rejection sensitivity as a programmatic illustration of the role expectancies play in racial/ethnic relations. Finally, we summarize and tie together the articles that comprise this section via a set of emergent themes that are common to the present contributions.

Toward an integrative CAPS approach to racial/ethnic relations.

The original CAPS formulation focused on the role of the individual's CAPS system in relation to situations, formalizing a person-situation framework. Subsequent research and theorizing on the culturally embedded CAPS system (C-CAPS) began to spell out how culture, context, and group-level processes intersect with both persons and situations. The contributions in this special section provide insights into the enormous complexity and the multiple layers through which context and persons "make each other up" in racial/ethnic relations. The challenge for personality psychologists is to examine and illuminate this interpenetration of context and person concretely and with increasing depth and precision. The CAPS framework provides a meta-level guide for this mission, and the present contributions illustrate the framework's heuristic value.

Walter Mischel (1930-2018).

This article memorializes Walter Mischel (1930 -2018). Mischel was a professor at the University of Colorado (1956 -1958), Harvard University (1958 -1962), Stanford University (1962-1983), and Columbia University (1983-2018). During this time, Mischel was recognized as a transformative figure in the field: he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1982, was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991, and was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Mischel as the 25th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Running throughout these achievements was Mischel's signature knack for uncovering psychological phenomena with studies that were as deep as they were elegant in their simplicity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Stigma and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: negative perceptions and anger emotional reactions mediate the link between active symptoms and social distance.

This study aimed to understand the contributions of active ADHD symptoms and the diagnostic label of ADHD in yielding negative attitudes and social distance ratings. Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (n = 305), respondents were assigned to read a vignette about: (a) a typically developing child, (b) a child with active ADHD symptoms and (c) a child with active ADHD symptoms + diagnostic label. Participants were then asked to answer questions about their beliefs and feelings about the child in the vignette. The active ADHD symptom condition predicted higher levels of social distance, and this link was mediated by negative and animalistic adjective ratings, and by angry emotions felt by the participants after reading the vignettes. Our findings suggest that ADHD symptoms drive negative views and social distance and that an ADHD label may serve as a protective factor to help people overcome biases related to childhood ADHD. ADHD symptom literacy and contact with children with varying levels of ADHD symptoms may be an important target to help reduce negative attitudes.

Introducing a New Assessment Tool for Measuring Ethnic-Racial Identity: The Cross Ethnic-Racial Identity Scale-Adult (CERIS-A).

In this article, we examined the psychometric properties of scores on a new instrument, the Cross Ethnic-Racial Identity Scale-Adult (CERIS-A) for use across different ethnic and racial groups. The CERIS-A measures seven ethnic-racial identity attitudes-assimilation, miseducation, self-hatred, anti-dominant, ethnocentricity, multiculturalist inclusive, and ethnic-racial salience. Participants consisted of 803 adults aged 18 to 76, including African Americans (19.3%), Asian Americans (17.6%), European Americans (37.0%), and Latino/as (17.8%). Analyses indicated that CERIS-A scores were reliable, and configural, metric, and scalar invariance were supported for the seven factors across gender; however, Miseducation, Ethnic-Racial Salience, and Ethnocentricity scores achieved only metric invariance across ethnic-racial groups. Self-Hatred, Ethnic-Racial Salience, Anti-Dominant, and Ethnocentricity scores were significantly and meaningfully related to race-based rejection sensitivity scores, providing evidence of convergent validity. We concluded that the CERIS-A is a potentially useful instrument for examining ethnic-racial identity attitudes across multiple racial/ethnic subgroups in the United States.

On the prevalence of racial discrimination in the United States.

Boutwell, Nedelec, Winegard, Shackelford, Beaver, Vaughn, Barnes, & Wright (2017) published an article in this journal that interprets data from the Add Health dataset as showing that only one-quarter of individuals in the United States experience discrimination. In Study 1, we attempted to replicate Boutwell et al.'s findings using a more direct measure of discrimination. Using data from the Pew Research Center, we examined a large sample of American respondents (N = 3,716) and explored the prevalence of discrimination experiences among various racial groups. Our findings stand in contrast to Boutwell et al.'s estimates, revealing that between 50% and 75% of Black, Hispanic, and Asian respondents (depending on the group and analytic approach) reported discriminatory treatment. In Study 2, we explored whether question framing affected how participants responded to Boutwell's question about experiencing less respect and courtesy. Regardless of question framing, non-White participants reported more experiences than White participants. Further, there was an interaction of participant race and question framing such that when participants were asked about experiences of less respect or courtesy broadly, there were no differences between non-White participants and White participants, but when they were asked about experiences that were specifically race-based, non-White participants reported more experiences than White participants. The current research provides a counterweight to the claim that discrimination is not a prevalent feature of the lives of minority groups and the serious implications this claim poses for research and public policy.

Structure and belonging: Pathways to success for underrepresented minority and women PhD students in STEM fields.

The advancement of underrepresented minority and women PhD students to elite postdoctoral and faculty positions in the STEM fields continues to lag that of majority males, despite decades of efforts to mitigate bias and increase opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds. In 2015, the National Science Foundation Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (NSF AGEP) California Alliance (Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford, UCLA) conducted a wide-ranging survey of graduate students across the mathematical, physical, engineering, and computer sciences in order to identify levers to improve the success of PhD students, and, in time, improve diversity in STEM leadership positions, especially the professoriate. The survey data were interpreted via path analysis, a method that identifies significant relationships, both direct and indirect, among various factors and outcomes of interest. We investigated two important outcomes: publication rates, which largely determine a new PhD student's competitiveness in the academic marketplace, and subjective well-being. Women and minority students who perceived that they were well-prepared for their graduate courses and accepted by their colleagues (faculty and fellow students), and who experienced well-articulated and structured PhD programs, were most likely to publish at rates comparable to their male majority peers. Women PhD students experienced significantly higher levels of distress than their male peers, both majority and minority, while both women and minority student distress levels were mitigated by clearly-articulated expectations, perceiving that they were well-prepared for graduate level courses, and feeling accepted by their colleagues. It is unclear whether higher levels of distress in women students is related directly to their experiences in their STEM PhD programs. The findings suggest that mitigating factors that negatively affect diversity should not, in principle, require the investment of large resources, but rather requires attention to the local culture and structure of individual STEM PhD programs.

Can cross-group friendships influence minority students' well-being at historically white universities?

Past research has demonstrated the negative impact of race-based rejection sensitivity (RS-race) on institutional belonging and satisfaction among minority-group students in predominantly White universities. Given research documenting the benefits of cross-group friendship for intergroup attitudes, we tested whether friendships with majority-group peers would attenuate the effects of RS-race within these contexts. In a longitudinal study of African American students (Study 1), cross-group friendships with majority-group peers buffered students high in RS-race from lack of belonging and dissatisfaction at their university. An experimental intervention (Study 2) that induced cross-group friendship replicated the findings and established their specificity for minority-group students. We discuss implications for efforts toward diversifying educational settings.

Distinguishing institutional identification from academic goal pursuit: interactive effects of ethnic identification and race-based rejection sensitivity.

We examined the interactive effects of ethnic identification (EI) and race-based rejection sensitivity (RS-race) on institutional outcomes among African American college students. We distinguished between effects on institutional identification on the one hand and academic goal pursuit (e.g., staying in school, grade point average [GPA]) on the other. Supporting the utility of this distinction, we found that EI and RS-race interacted to predict these outcomes differently. Higher EI in combination with higher RS-race predicted reduced identification with the institution (Studies 1, 2, and 3a). This combination, however, did not lead to decreases in GPA over time. Moreover, EI was positively related to intentions to stay in school as well as to GPA increases among those lower in RS-race (Studies 1 and 3b). Implications for understanding identity negotiation vis-à-vis performance in institutional settings are discussed.