Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Attractiveness As A Function Of Skin Tone And Facial Features: Evidence From Categorization Studies, Elena V. Stepanova, Michael J. Strube

Faculty Publications

Participants rated the attractiveness and racial typicality of male faces varying in their facial features from Afrocentric to Eurocentric and in skin tone from dark to light in two experiments. Experiment 1 provided evidence that facial features and skin tone have an interactive effect on perceptions of attractiveness and mixed-race faces are perceived as more attractive than single-race faces. Experiment 2 further confirmed that faces with medium levels of skin tone and facial features are perceived as more attractive than faces with extreme levels of these factors. Black phenotypes (combinations of dark skin tone and Afrocentric facial features) were rated …

Ignorance Is Bliss: Emotion, Politics, And Why Whites Avoid Information About Race, Evangelina Derosa

Honors Scholar Theses

This study investigated partisan differences, as well as guilt, anger, and shame as motivating emotions, to understand and predict information avoidance on topics related to race and policing. We predicted liberals would be more likely than conservatives to seek information on topics related to race; guilt, anger, and shame would be motivating emotions to seek information. We expected liberals to use guilt, anger, and shame as motivating emotions to seek information, and expected conservatives to experience lower levels of these emotions, and therefore avoid such information. Participants (N=420) were given information about police violence against people of color. …

‘Speaking Truth’ Protects Underrepresented Minorities’ Intellectual Performance And Safety In Stem, Avi Ben-Zeev, Yula Paluy, Katlyn L. Milless, Emily J. Goldstein, Lyndsey Wallace, Leticia Márquez-Magaña, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Mica Estrada

Publications and Research

We offer and test a brief psychosocial intervention, Speaking Truth to EmPower (STEP), designed to protect underrepresented minorities’ (URMs) intellectual performance and safety in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). STEP takes a ‘knowledge as power’ approach by: (a) providing a tutorial on stereotype threat (i.e., a social contextual phenomenon, implicated in underperformance and early exit) and (b) encouraging URMs to use lived experiences for generating be-prepared coping strategies. Participants were 670 STEM undergraduates [URMs (Black/African American and Latina/o) and non-URMs (White/European American and Asian/Asian American)]. STEP protected URMs’ abstract reasoning and class grades (adjusted for grade point average [GPA]) …

Studying Guilt Perception In Millennials: Unexpected Effects Of Suspects' Race And Attractiveness, D. Lisa Cothran, Elena V. Stepanova, K. Raquel Barlow

Faculty Publications

The present study explored mock jurors’ guilt judgments with a 2 (Jurors’ Race: Black vs. White) × 2 (Suspects’ Race: Black vs. White) × 2 (Suspects’ Attractiveness: High vs. Low) design in a group of Millennials (N = 331). Black jurors were more lenient; all jurors were more lenient toward Black suspects; and White jurors were less lenient toward Black unattractive suspects. The current study contributes the following novel findings to the literature: documentation of a possible Black experimenter effect in mock jurors; an interaction among suspects’ race, suspects’ attractiveness, and jurors’ race, suggesting that racial bias exhibited by …

Smoking, Depression, And Hospital Costs Of Respiratory Cancers: Examining Race And Sex Variation, Baqar A. Husaini, Robert S. Levine, Phillip Lammers, Pam Hull, Meggan Novotny, Majaz Moonis

Center for Prevention Research Publications

Objective To investigate the effect of smoking and depression on hospital costs for lung cancer (LC).

Methods We extracted data on depression, smoking history, demographics, and hospital charges for patients with respiratory cancers (ICD-9 codes 161–163, 165) from the 2008 Tennessee Hospital Discharge Data System. The sample (n=6665) was mostly white (86%) and male (57%). Age-adjusted rates were developed in accordance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention methods, and hospital costs were compared for patients with LC with versus without depression and a smoking history.

Results Three findings (P<0.001) emerged: (1) the LC rate was higher among blacks than among whites, and higher among men than among women; (2) while 66% of LC patients smoked (more men than women without racial variation), 24% had depression (more females and whites were depressed); (3) the LC hospital cost was 54% higher than the non-LC hospital cost, and this cost doubled for patients with LC with depression and smoking versus those without such characteristics.

Conclusion While LC is more prevalent among …

Thinking About Race: How Group Biases Interact With Ideological Principles To Yield Attitudes Toward Government Assistance, Frank John Gonzalez

Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When are people more likely to evaluate race-targeted government assistance based on ideological principles rather than racial prejudice? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms by which prejudice influences political attitudes. In this dissertation, I develop a theoretical model for explaining how deep-seated, automatic group biases interact with higher-order, ideological principles in order to influence attitudes toward race-targeted government assistance. I suggest group-based principles are more important than individualistic values or ingroup favoritism in explaining race-targeted policy attitudes. I argue that when people evaluate race-targeted policies, controlled neural processes translate automatic neural processes into …

Improving Assessment Of Race, Ethnicity, And Culture To Further Veteran Ptsd Research., Jane M. Onoye, Michele Spoont, Julia M. Whealin, Nnamdi Pole, Margaret Anne Mackintosh, James L. Spira, Leslie A. Morland

Psychology: Faculty Publications

Objective: Racial and ethnic disparities in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its treatment have been documented for both civilians and military veterans. To better understand the presence of disparities and factors that might contribute to them, accurate assessment of race and ethnicity is critical; however there still remains unstandardized assessment and challenges to implementation. The authors highlight specific problems in the assessment of race and ethnicity in research, such as missing data, misclassification, classification categories too limited to reflect many peoples' social identities, and inappropriate aggregation of ethnoracial subgroups. Conclusions: A proposal is made for a minimal uniform assessment standard …

Enhancing Student Altruism Using Secure Attachment Messages (Sam) In Lecture, Kelly Campbell, Stephany Ramos

Psychology Faculty Publications

In this brief report, we examine whether students’ (N=230) willingness to help individuals in distress (altruism) would be augmented after viewing Secure Attachment Messages (SAM) during lecture in a college racism course. Students were presented with SAM in alternating weeks as part of the PowerPoint presentation slides. In each of the weeks, their likelihood of engaging in altruistic behaviors was assessed using hypothetical scenarios and a student response system, Top Hat Monocle. We predicted that the SAM would prompt students to think of their attachment figures and enhance their feelings of security, which would increase their willingness to engage in …

Interactive Effects Of Obvious And Ambiguous Social Categories On Perceptions Of Leadership: When Double-Minority Status May Be Beneficial, John Paul Wilson, Jessica D. Remedios, Nicholas O. Rule

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Easily perceived identities (e.g., race) may interact with perceptually ambiguous identities (e.g., sexual orientation) in meaningful but elusive ways. Here, we investigated how intersecting identities impact impressions of leadership. People perceived gay Black men as better leaders than members of either single-minority group (i.e., gay or Black). Yet, different traits supported judgments of the leadership abilities of Black and White targets; for instance, warmth positively predicted leadership judgments for Black men but dominance positively predicted leadership judgments for White men. These differences partly occurred because of different perceptions of masculinity across the intersection of race and sexual orientation. Indeed, both …