CAREER: SBP: Understanding Emotion Regulatory Flexibility among African American Adolescents

Recent instances of violence targeting African Americans has sparked protests and greater attention to the racism that African American youth and their families have faced for generations in the United States. Studies report that most African American youth will experience racism during their lifetimes, and these experiences increase their risk for negative life outcomes, such as poor mental and physical health and less academic success.

How do African American youth manage their experiences with racism to protect against such negative outcomes? This research examines how African American youth develop a specific form of emotional competence, called emotion regulatory flexibility, to protect themselves from racism. They may attend to cues that signal when an interaction is not going well, and then use these signals to adjust how they express and manage their emotions so that others do not perceive them as angry or threatening.

This research provides a novel perspective on emotion regulatory flexibility as a form of emotion-related competence that is malleable and culturally situated.

How do African American youth develop such self-protective emotional competence? This question is addressed by doing research with both African American youth and their parents, and by combining physiological and self-report measures. The unique approach provides subjective and objective indicators of emotional reactions to racism and captures the social cues that African American youth use to manage these situations.

The research also includes parent-child interactions to reveal how parents discuss these issues with their children. This project provides training experiences for junior scientists from various racial backgrounds in how to work with the African American community to address the effect of racism on youth, and can help African American youth recognize their positive emotion skills.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.