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Sarah Elizabeth Gaither

Nicholas J. and Theresa M. Leonardy Associate Professor
Psychology & Neuroscience
417 Chapel Hill Dr, Box 90086, Durham, NC 27708
417 Chapel Drive, 324 Reuben-Cooke Building, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications


Adolescent boys' aggressive responses to perceived threats to their gender typicality.

Journal Article Developmental science · November 2024 When adult men are made to feel gender-atypical, they often lash out with aggression, particularly when they are pressured (vs. autonomously motivated) to be gender-typical. Here, we examined the development of this phenomenon. Specifically, we provided a ... Full text Cite

How diversity in contexts and experiences shape perception and learning across the lifespan.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · November 2024 The field of psychology has a long history of studying how diversity influences various outcomes such as identity development, social behaviors, perceptions, and decision making. However, considering the ways that diversity science research has expanded in ... Full text Cite

The relationship between racial/ethnic identification and body ideal internalization, hair satisfaction, and skin tone satisfaction in black and black/white biracial women.

Journal Article Body image · September 2024 Eurocentric physical characteristics, including a thin, tall physique, long straight hair, and fair skin, typify Western beauty standards. Past research indicates that for Black women, greater identification with one's racial/ethnic culture may buffer agai ... Full text Cite

Testing intergroup contact theory through a natural experiment of randomized college roommate assignments in the United States.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · August 2024 Many colleges and universities seek to leverage the promise of intergroup contact theory by adopting housing policies that randomly assign first-year students to roommates, with the goal of increasing intergroup contact. Yet, it is unclear whether random r ... Full text Cite

It's not what you say it's what you do: School diversity ideologies and adolescent mental health and academic engagement.

Journal Article Journal of research on adolescence : the official journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence · July 2024 This study examined the relation between schools' color-evasive versus multicultural diversity ideologies, school characteristics, and adolescent development. Across two datasets linking individual-level survey data (N = 1692) and administrative records (N ... Full text Cite

Gender attitudes and gender discrimination among ethnically and geographically diverse young children

Journal Article Infant and Child Development · May 1, 2024 Despite increasing advocacy for gender equality, gender prejudice and discrimination persist. The origins of these biases develop in early childhood, but it is less clear whether (1) children's gender attitudes predict discrimination and (2) gender attitud ... Full text Cite

Starting and sustaining fruitful collaborations in psychology

Journal Article Social and Personality Psychology Compass · April 1, 2024 Much of psychological science relies on collaboration—from generating new theories and study ideas, to collecting and analyzing data, to writing and sharing results with the broader community. Learning how to collaborate with others is an important skill, ... Full text Cite

Hypodescent or ingroup overexclusion?: Children's and adults' racial categorization of ambiguous black/white biracial faces.

Journal Article Developmental science · March 2024 Two processes describe racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial categorization-the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of their socially subordinated racial group (i.e., Black/White Biracial faces cate ... Full text Cite

The rich get richer? Children's reasoning about socioeconomic status predicts inclusion and resource bias.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · March 2024 Children's socioeconomic status (SES) is linked to disparate access to resources and affects social behaviors such as inclusion and resource allocations. Yet it is unclear whether children's essentialized view of SES (i.e., believing SES is immutable) or s ... Full text Cite

Race differences in patient trust and distrust from audio-recorded cardiology encounters.

Journal Article Patient Educ Couns · February 2024 OBJECTIVE: Many have reported racial disparities in self-reported trust in clinicians but have not directly assessed expressions of trust and distrust in physician-patient encounters. We created a codebook to examine racial differences in patient trust and ... Full text Link to item Cite

Mixed-heritage individuals’ encounters with raciolinguistic ideologies

Journal Article Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development · January 1, 2024 Mixed-heritage individuals (MHIs) are known to face high levels of social exclusion. Here, we investigate how raciolinguistic ideologies related to one’s heritage language abilities add to these exclusionary experiences. The results from 293 MHIs reveal fr ... Full text Cite

A qualitative analysis of trust and distrust within patient-clinician interactions.

Journal Article PEC Innov · December 15, 2023 OBJECTIVES: Trust represents a key quality of strong clinician-patient relationships.1 Many have attempted to assess patient-reported trust. However, most trust measures suffer from ceiling effects, with no variability, making it not possible to examine pr ... Full text Link to item Cite

When Is Masculinity "Fragile"? An Expectancy-Discrepancy-Threat Model of Masculine Identity.

Journal Article Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · November 2023 Academic abstractManhood is a precarious social status. Under perceived gender identity threat, men are disproportionately likely to enact certain stereotype-consistent responses such as aggression to maintain their gender status. Yet less is know ... Full text Cite

Parent and self-socialization of gender intergroup attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors among ethnically and geographically diverse young children.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · October 2023 Previous work has shown the robust nature of gender bias in both children and adults. However, much less attention has been paid toward understanding what factors shape these biases. The current preregistered study used parent surveys and child interviews ... Full text Cite

Intergroup Context Moderates the Impact of White Americans' Identification on Racial Categorization of Ambiguous Faces.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · August 2023 We examined how the number of groups in a categorization task influences how White Americans categorize ambiguous faces. We investigated the strength of identity-driven ingroup overexclusion-wherein highly identified perceivers overexclude ambiguous ... Full text Cite

Children's cross-cultural categorizations of racially ambiguous faces in Taiwan and the U.S.

Journal Article Cultural diversity & ethnic minority psychology · July 2023 ObjectivesRacially ambiguous face categorization research is growing in prominence, and yet the majority of this work has focused on White and Western samples and has primarily used biracial Black/White stimuli. Past findings suggest that biracial ... Full text Cite

Categorizing a Face and Facing a Category: The Constructive Impacts of Ambiguity and Uncertainty in Racial Categorization.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · June 2023 The past generation has seen a dramatic rise in multiracial populations and a consequent increase in exposure to individuals who challenge monolithic racial categories. We examine and compare two potential outcomes of the multiracial population growth that ... Full text Cite

Do we perceive ethnic ingroup members as wealthier? Examining Hong Kong children's inferences of wealth status based on resources and ethnic group membership

Journal Article Cognitive Development · April 1, 2023 The way in which children consider information may depend on the groups to which they belong and the social status those groups occupy. In three studies, we examined how children infer their peers’ wealth status based on the possessions present and ethnic ... Full text Cite

Detecting biracial identity strength: Perceived phenotypicality is inaccurate

Journal Article Self and Identity · January 1, 2023 Past work on Black and Latinx individuals demonstrates that observers can accurately predict an individual’s racial identity strength based on the observers’ perceptions of the individual’s phenotypic prototypicality (how much someone looks like a prototyp ... Full text Cite

Two Or More: A Comparative Analysis of Multiracial and Multicultural Research

Book · December 22, 2022 Most research has investigated Multiracial and Multicultural populations as separate topics, despite demographic and experiential overlap between these. This Element bridges that divide by reviewing and comparing Multiracial and Multicultural research to d ... Open Access Link to item Cite

The good life in cultural context: Examining Asian young adults’ psychological well-being and narratives of negative experiences

Journal Article Journal of Research in Personality · December 1, 2022 Few narrative identity studies have investigated how common correlates of well-being in the U.S. (redemption, contamination, agency, and communion) relate to the good life for non-U.S., racial minority populations. The current study assessed whether Asian ... Full text Cite

Development and validation of a measure of curvy ideals internalization.

Journal Article Body image · December 2022 Several sociocultural female body ideals exist - thin, muscular/athletic, and, more recently, curvier ideals, which research specifically suggests are more prevalent among Black women. Two validated measures assess women's desire for curvier bodies, but ne ... Full text Cite

Voter Evaluations of Biracial‐Identified Political Candidates

Journal Article Social Sciences · April 1, 2022 Today, identity expression and acceptance represent an important area of political advocacy and representation. Yet, how responsive are voters to new racial identity cues promoted by political leaders? Using candidates with interracial backgrounds as a cas ... Full text Cite

Psychological Science in the Wake of COVID-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations.

Journal Article Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · March 2022 The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize ... Full text Cite

How Cross-Discipline Understanding and Communication Can Improve Research on Multiracial Populations

Journal Article Social Sciences · March 1, 2022 One of the strengths of Critical Mixed Race Studies is that it represents research methodolo-gies and frameworks from multiple disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. However, if these disciplines are not in dialogue with each other, that be ... Full text Cite

How White American Children Develop Racial Biases in Emotion Reasoning.

Journal Article Affective science · March 2022 For decades, affective scientists have examined how adults and children reason about others' emotions. Yet, our knowledge is limited regarding how emotion reasoning is impacted by race-that is, how individuals reason about emotions displayed by people of o ... Full text Cite

About Face: Seeing Class and Race

Journal Article Journal of Economic Issues · January 1, 2022 People’s social class, and the perceptions of their social class are embedded in an institutional context that has important ramifications for one’s life opportunities and outcomes. Research on first impressions has found that people are relatively accurat ... Full text Cite

Not Quite White or Black: Biracial Students’ Perceptions of Threat and Belonging Across School Contexts

Journal Article Journal of Early Adolescence · November 1, 2021 Stereotype threat posits that students who are members of negatively stereotyped groups in school should feel more threat and less belonging, especially in schools with large achievement disparities and low racial/ethnic minority representation. This resea ... Full text Cite

"Be a Man": The Role of Social Pressure in Eliciting Men's Aggressive Cognition.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · November 2021 Threatening a man's manhood-but not a woman's womanhood-elicits aggression. In two studies, we found evidence that this aggression is related to the social pressure men experience to "be a man." In Study 1a, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis to i ... Full text Cite

Alcohol use and related consequences for monoracial and multiracial Native American/American Indian college students.

Journal Article Exp Clin Psychopharmacol · October 2021 Native American/American Indian (NA/AI) and Multiracial people (those who claim multiple racial identities) report notably high alcohol use compared to other racial groups in the United States. Nearly half of the NA/AI population is also Multiracial, yet N ... Full text Link to item Cite

Who can be in a group? 3- to 5-year-old children construe realistic social groups through mutual intentionality

Journal Article Cognitive Development · October 1, 2021 Recent research suggests that young children's causal justification for minimal group membership can be induced via a cognitive framework of mutual intentionality. That is, an individual can become a group member when both the individual and group agree to ... Full text Cite

A Meta-Analytic Review of Hypodescent Patterns in Categorizing Multiracial and Racially Ambiguous Targets.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · May 2021 Research addressing the increasing multiracial population (i.e., identifying with two or more races) is rapidly expanding. This meta-analysis (k = 55) examines categorization patterns consistent with hypodescent, or the tendency to categorize ... Full text Cite

The clash of culture and cuisine: A qualitative exploration of cultural tensions and attitudes toward food and body in Chinese young adult women.

Journal Article Int J Eat Disord · February 2021 OBJECTIVE: Accumulating evidence suggests that the prevalence of eating disorders among Chinese women is a public health concern. Prior studies have drawn linkages between conflicting cultural values, identity confusion, and eating disorder symptomatology, ... Full text Link to item Cite

Perceptions and experiences of (people with) unconventional identities

Journal Article Self and Identity · January 1, 2021 Psychology has long focused on social identities and their critical role in defining the self. However, the majority of identity-related findings stems from research on traditional identities (monoracial, cisgender, heterosexual). Considering the relative ... Full text Cite

Behavioral Science Interventions: Integrating the Decision Task, Context, and Individual Differences to Inform Policy

Journal Article Translational Issues in Psychological Science · January 1, 2021 Interest in applying evidence from psychological science to strengthen public policy has increased in recent years. The governments of at least 20 countries have “nudge units,” or teams of researchers and policymakers dedicated to applying insights from ps ... Full text Open Access Cite

Alcohol Use and Related Consequences for Monoracial and Multiracial Native American/American Indian College students

Journal Article · 2021 Native American/American Indian (NA/AI) and Multiracial people (those who claim multiple racial groups) report notably high alcohol use compared to other racial groups in the United States. Nearly half of the NA/AI population is also Multiracial, yet NA ... Full text Cite

Mixed-Heritage Individuals’ Encounters with Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Journal Article · 2021 Mixed-heritage individuals (MHIs) are known to face high levels of social exclusion. Here, we investigate how raciolinguistic ideologies related to one’s heritage language abilities add to these exclusionary experiences. The results from 293 MHIs reveal ... Full text Cite

Social Class Identity Integration and Success for First-Generation College Students: Antecedents, Mechanisms, and Generalizability

Journal Article · 2021 Past research has investigated challenges first-generation college students face, but has overlooked the role that acculturation to college may play. Social class bicultural identity integration research demonstrates that integrated social class identit ... Full text Cite

Social Class Identity Integration and Success for First-Generation College Students: Antecedents, Mechanisms, and Generalizability

Journal Article Self and Identity · January 1, 2021 Social class bicultural identity integration research demonstrates that integrated social class identities are linked with better health, well-being, and academic performance among first-generation students. Here, we demonstrate that exposure to college gr ... Full text Cite

Who Can Be in a Group? 3- to 5-Year-Old Children Construe Realistic Social Groups Through Mutual Intentionality

Journal Article · 2021 Recent research suggests that young children’s causal justification for minimal group membership can be induced via a cognitive framework of mutual intentionality. That is, an individual can become a group member when both the individual and group agree ... Full text Cite

Children’s cross-cultural categorizations of racially ambiguous faces in Taiwan and the U.S.

Journal Article · 2021 Objectives: Racially ambiguous face categorization research is growing in prominence, and yet the majority of this work has focused on White and Western samples and has primarily used biracial Black/White stimuli. Past findings suggest that biracial Bla ... Full text Cite

About Face: Seeing Class and Race

Journal Article · 2021 People’s social class, and the perceptions of their social class are embedded in an institutional context that has important ramifications for one’s life opportunities and outcomes. Research on first impressions has found that people are relatively accu ... Full text Cite

How Policies Can Address Multiracial Stigma

Journal Article Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences · October 1, 2020 Twenty years ago, Multiracial Americans completed the U.S Census with the option to indicate more than one race for the first time. As we embark on the second anniversary of this shift in Multiracial recognition, this article reviews the research related t ... Full text Cite

“Mixed” Drinking Motivations: A Comparison of Majority, Multiracial, and Minority College Students

Journal Article Social Psychological and Personality Science · July 1, 2020 Social exclusion is associated with substance use, but the specific link between majority and minority racial group membership and substance use is unknown. We examined how social exclusion among racial majority (White), Multiracial, and racial minority (N ... Full text Cite

Experiences with microaggressions and discrimination in racially diverse and homogeneously white contexts.

Journal Article Cultural diversity & ethnic minority psychology · April 2020 ObjectivesThe interaction between one's context and identity may be essential in understanding people's racial experiences. In this study, we examined 2 contexts (racially diverse vs. homogenously White) and measured the experiences of discriminat ... Full text Cite

Not Quite Monoracial: Biracial Stereotypes Explored.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · March 2020 Stereotypes often guide our perceptions of members of social groups. However, research has yet to document what stereotypes may exist for the fastest growing youth demographic in the United States-biracial individuals. Across seven studies (N = 1,10 ... Full text Cite

Thinking about multiple identities boosts children's flexible thinking.

Journal Article Developmental science · January 2020 Studies of children's developing social identification often focus on individual forms of identity. Yet, everyone has multiple potential identities. Here we investigated whether making children aware of their multifaceted identities-effectively seeing them ... Full text Open Access Cite

Race, Gender, and the Development of Cross-Race Egalitarianism.

Journal Article Frontiers in psychology · January 2020 Over the course of development, children acquire adult-like thinking about social categories such as race, which in turn informs their perceptions, attitudes, and behavior. However, children's developing perceptions of race have been understudied particula ... Full text Cite

“Be a Man”: The Role of Social Pressure in Eliciting Men’s Aggressive Cognition

Journal Article · 2020 [Manuscript published in PSPB on Jan 27, 2021.] Threatening a man’s manhood—but not a woman’s womanhood—elicits aggression. In two studies, we found evidence that this aggression is related to the social pressure men experience to “be a man.” In Study 1 ... Full text Cite

Intra-Race Intersectionality: Identity Denial Among Dual-Minority Biracial People

Journal Article Translational Issues in Psychological Science · January 1, 2020 Because many biracial people identify as members of multiple racial groups, they often experience identity denial (e.g., they are told to identify differently) and identity questioning (e.g., they are asked about their background). Though identity denial a ... Full text Cite

Psychophysiological Stress Responses to Bicultural and Biracial Identity Denial

Journal Article Journal of Social Issues · December 1, 2019 Bicultural and biracial individuals (those who identify either with two cultures or two races) are often denied membership in the groups with which they identify, an experience referred to as identity denial. The present studies used an experimental design ... Full text Cite

Identity Questioning: Antecedents and Consequences of Prejudice Attributions

Journal Article Journal of Social Issues · June 1, 2019 Many ethnic minorities in the United States hold both an ethnic minority and national American identity. Yet, they often encounter identity questioning when asked questions such as, “Where are you really from?,” which may operate as an ambiguous threat to ... Full text Cite

Loss and loyalty: Change in political and gender identity among Clinton supporters after the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Journal Article Self and Identity · March 4, 2019 How do voters’ identities change after a candidate’s defeat? A longitudinal, within-subjects study used Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to explore social identity theory’s (SIT) tenet that threats to self-relevant groups motiv ... Full text Cite

Identity Denied: Comparing American or White Identity Denial and Psychological Health Outcomes Among Bicultural and Biracial People.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · March 2019 Because bicultural and biracial people have two identities within one social domain (culture or race), their identification is often challenged by others. Although it is established that identity denial is associated with poor psychological health, the pro ... Full text Cite

Exposure to Biracial Faces Reduces Colorblindness.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · January 2019 Across six studies, we demonstrate that exposure to biracial individuals significantly reduces endorsement of colorblindness as a racial ideology among White individuals. Real-world exposure to biracial individuals predicts lower levels of colorblindness c ... Full text Cite

At face value: Psychological outcomes differ for real vs. computer-generated multiracial faces.

Journal Article The Journal of social psychology · January 2019 Multiracial research emphasizes hypodescent categorizations and relies on computer-generated stimuli. Four experiments showed that real biracial faces in a 2-Choice categorization task (White, Black) elicited hypodescent more than computer-generated faces. ... Full text Cite

Learning and Socializing Preferences in Hong Kong Chinese Children.

Journal Article Child development · November 2018 The impact of social group information on the learning and socializing preferences of Hong Kong Chinese children were examined. Specifically, the degree to which variability in racial out-group exposure affects children's use of race to make decisions abou ... Full text Open Access Cite

Racial/ethnic socialization for White youth: What we know and future directions

Journal Article Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology · November 1, 2018 Teaching and talking about race and ethnicity with children and adults is especially important in racially diverse societies. This process has been coined racial/ethnic socialization (RES). Despite the importance of RES, we still know very little about how ... Full text Cite

Black + White = Not White: A minority bias in categorizations of Black-White multiracials

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · September 1, 2018 The present research sought to provide new insights on the principles guiding the categorization of Black-White multiracial faces at a first encounter. Previous studies have typically measured categorization of multiracial faces using close-ended tasks tha ... Full text Cite

The multiplicity of belonging: Pushing identity research beyond binary thinking

Journal Article Self and Identity · July 4, 2018 To date, research has primarily used a singular identity framework for investigating how social identity shapes behavior. Thus, research has also largely ignored the role that having multiple, simultaneous identities may play in our lives. This paper revie ... Full text Cite

Fluid racial presentation: Perceptions of contextual “passing” among biracial people

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · July 1, 2018 Existing monoracial identity frameworks fail to capture the experiences of biracial people, for whom racial identification may depend on the social context. Though biracial people can vary their racial identity, the social consequences of context-dependent ... Full text Cite

A review of multiracial malleability: Identity, categorization, and shifting racial attitudes

Journal Article Social and Personality Psychology Compass · June 1, 2018 The majority of social perception research to date has focused on perceptually obvious and prototypical representations of social categories. However, not all people belong to social categories that are easily discernable. Within the past decade, there has ... Full text Cite

Mere Membership in Racially Diverse Groups Reduces Conformity

Journal Article Social Psychological and Personality Science · May 1, 2018 Three studies assessed the impact of White individuals’ mere membership in racially diverse or homogeneous groups on conformity. In Study 1, White participants were randomly assigned to four-person groups that were racially diverse or homogeneous in which ... Full text Cite

Resolving racial ambiguity in social interactions

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · May 1, 2018 People take longer to categorize racially ambiguous individuals, but does this perceptual complexity also affect social interactions? In Study 1, White participants interacted with a racially ambiguous confederate who was either labeled as biracial Black/W ... Full text Cite

The role of gender in racial meta-stereotypes and stereotypes

Journal Article Social Cognition · January 1, 2018 Stereotypes often guide interracial interactions-both the stereotypes we hold about others, and the stereotypes we believe others hold about us (i.e., meta-stereotypes). In Black-White interactions, the stereotype that Whites are prejudiced is one of the m ... Full text Cite

Black Racial Stereotypes and Victim Blaming: Implications for Media Coverage and Criminal Proceedings in Cases of Police Violence against Racial and Ethnic Minorities

Journal Article Journal of Social Issues · December 1, 2017 Posthumous stereotypical media portrayals of Michael Brown and other racial and ethnic minority victims of police violence have sparked questions about the influence of racial stereotypes on public opinions about their deaths and criminal proceedings for t ... Full text Cite

Examining the effects of I-sharing for future white-black interactions

Journal Article Social Psychology · May 1, 2016 Research shows that I-sharing, or sharing subjective experiences with an outgroup member, positively shapes attitudes toward that outgroup member. We investigated whether this type of social experience would also promote a positive interracial interaction ... Full text Cite

Social belonging motivates categorization of racially ambiguous faces

Journal Article Social Cognition · April 1, 2016 Featured Publication Categorizing racially ambiguous individuals is multifaceted, and the current work proposes social-motivational factors also exert considerable influence on how racial ambiguity is perceived, directing the resolution of ambiguity in a manner that is functio ... Full text Cite

Young, black, and endangered: Examining the deaths of trayvon martin, michael brown, and tamir rice through a psychological lens

Chapter · January 1, 2016 The deaths of unarmed racial minorities across the United States have garnered widespread attention and speculation, yet the discussions surrounding why these events keep occurring remain limited. In this chapter, we apply a psychological lens to three not ... Cite

Reframing anxiety to encourage interracial interactions.

Journal Article Translational Issues in Psychological Science · December 2015 Full text Cite

Priming White identity elicits stereotype boost for biracial Black-White individuals

Journal Article Group Processes and Intergroup Relations · November 29, 2015 Psychological threat experienced by students of negatively stereotyped groups impairs test performance. However, stereotype boost can also occur if a positively stereotyped identity is made salient. Biracial individuals, whose racial identities may be asso ... Full text Cite

Thinking Outside the Box: Multiple Identity Mind-Sets Affect Creative Problem Solving

Journal Article Social Psychological and Personality Science · July 5, 2015 Featured Publication Rigid thinking is associated with less creativity, suggesting that priming a flexible mind-set should boost creative thought. In three studies, we investigate whether priming multiple social identities predicts more creativity in domains unrelated to socia ... Full text Cite

Caught in the Middle: Defensive Responses to IAT Feedback Among Whites, Blacks, and Biracial Black/Whites

Journal Article Social Psychological and Personality Science · May 1, 2015 This study used archival data to examine how White, Black, and biracial Black/White people respond to implicit attitude feedback suggesting that they harbor racial bias that does not align with their self-reported attitudes. The results suggested that peop ... Full text Cite

“Mixed” Results: Multiracial Research and Identity Explorations

Journal Article Current Directions in Psychological Science · April 9, 2015 Multiracial individuals report that the social pressure of having to “choose” one of their racial groups is a primary source of psychological conflict. Yet because of their ability to maneuver among their multiple identities, multiracials also adopt flexib ... Full text Cite

Sounding Black or White: priming identity and biracial speech.

Journal Article Frontiers in psychology · January 2015 Research has shown that priming one's racial identity can alter a biracial individuals' social behavior, but can such priming also influence their speech? Language is often used as a marker of one's social group membership and studies have shown that socia ... Full text Cite

Perceiving a presidency in black (and white): Four years later

Journal Article Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy · December 1, 2014 When Barack Obama became the "first Black President" of the United States in 2008, researchers examined how his election impacted Americans' views of racial progress. When he was reelected in 2012, the minority status of the president had become less novel ... Full text Cite

Monoracial and biracial children: effects of racial identity saliency on social learning and social preferences.

Journal Article Child development · November 2014 Featured Publication Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial in-group but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N = 246, 3-8 years) had their racial identit ... Full text Cite

Motivation to control prejudice predicts categorization of multiracials.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · May 2014 Multiracial individuals often do not easily fit into existing racial categories. Perceivers may adopt a novel racial category to categorize multiracial targets, but their willingness to do so may depend on their motivations. We investigated whether perceiv ... Full text Cite

Essentialist thinking predicts decrements in children's memory for racially ambiguous faces.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · February 2014 Featured Publication Past research shows that adults often display poor memory for racially ambiguous and racial outgroup faces, with both face types remembered worse than own-race faces. In the present study, the authors examined whether children also show this pattern of res ... Full text Cite

When the half affects the whole: Priming identity for biracial individuals in social interactions

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · May 1, 2013 Featured Publication In two studies we investigate how the fluid identities of biracial individuals interact with contextual factors to shape behavior in interracial settings. In Study 1, biracial Black/White participants (n = 22) were primed with either their Black or White i ... Full text Cite

Living with an other-race roommate shapes Whites' behavior in subsequent diverse settings

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · March 1, 2013 Featured Publication In a multi-phase research design over two academic semesters, White college students assigned to either a same-race or other-race roommate were tracked across two survey phases and a third phase involving an interracial interaction with a Black stranger. A ... Full text Cite

Honk if you like minorities: Vuvuzela attitudes predict outgroup liking

Journal Article International Review for the Sociology of Sport · February 1, 2013 The 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa generated extensive controversy over spectators' use of the African vuvuzela trumpet. We asked 123 White American participants about their opinions of vuvuzelas as well as their attitudes towards a variety of racial/ ... Full text Cite

Biracial and monoracial infant own-race face perception: an eye tracking study.

Journal Article Developmental science · November 2012 We know that early experience plays a crucial role in the development of face processing, but we know little about how infants learn to distinguish faces from different races, especially for non-Caucasian populations. Moreover, it is unknown whether differ ... Full text Cite