Principal Investigator: Fantasy Lozada, Ph.D.
Funding: NSF Early Career Development Award: 2046607
African American youth might change the ways that they express and manage their emotions during social interactions based on these social environment cues so others may perceive them as less angry or threatening -- a concept called emotion regulatory flexibility (ERF). The aim of this project is to understand the ways African American youth might use and show ERF, how they may be taught ERF by their parents, and how ERF might help youth protect themselves from racism. Participants in this project will be African American teenagers in the sixth grade and one of their parents in the southeastern United States. Teenagers will complete questionnaires about how they express and manage their emotions and how much they use social environment cues to decide their emotion expression and management, their experiences with racism, and their emotionally healthy behaviors. Teenagers will also have their heart rate and respiration measured while resting and while listening to a story about racism to see how well they are able to regulate their emotions. Parents will complete questionnaires about their own experiences with racism and how they teach their teenagers about race and emotion. Finally, teenagers and their parents will talk about two experiences of racism, what they would feel during that experience, and how they would manage those feelings.