No description available.

The present study sought to examine Asian American college stress and school satisfaction for Claremont Colleges students. Participants completed a survey which will include four measures: Attitudes Toward Professional Help-Seeking (Halgin, Weaver, Edell & Spencer, 1987), modified Social Support Scale (Duran, Oetzel, Lucero, Jiang, Novins, Manson, & Beals, 2005), College Student Stress Scale (Feldt, 2008), the School Satisfaction Scale (Butler, 2007), and questions about the participant’s involvement in race-based, and non-race-based organizations and mentoring programs. Asian Americans are unsupported because of their academic performance and thus receive less institutional support (Kiang & Lee, 1993). The stigma of mental health problems is significantly and negatively related to attitudes toward professional help seeking in the Asian American community (Masuda & Boone, 2011). Race-based organizations and mentoring programs facilitate adjustment to college through providing a community and ways to explore one’s identity (Kim, Goto, Bai, Kim, & Wong, 2001; Museus, 2008). It was expected that attitudes toward help seeking and support would be significantly different between Asian Americans and Whites. It was expected that involvement in ethnic-/race-based organizations and mentor programs would mediate the relationship between demographics and satisfaction, support and stress. Results revealed significantly different attitudes toward help seeking between Asian Americans and Whites. Involvement in race-based organization and mentoring program predicted school satisfaction. Involvement in a race-based mentoring program predicted stress. Implications of this study are discussed in relation to literature, clinicians, and on-campus support services.

The 2008 election of Barack Obama to the United States’ presidency is an undeniable historical landmark demonstrating progress in race relations; however, it has yet to be determined how the election affects the way in which racial minorities are viewed and whether Obama’s presidency will advance their societal position. Despite some claims that the election signifies the existence of a post-racial nation, recent social (Harlow 2008; Hunt and Wilson 2009; Parker, Sawyer, Towler 2009; Tesler 2010), psychological (Effron, Cameron, and Monin 2009; Eibach, and Purdie-Vaughns 2009; Kaiser et al. 2009), political (Piston 2001; Huddy and Feldman 2009; Redlawsk, Tolbert, and Franco 2010), economic (Jacobson 2010; Lewis-Beck and Tien (2009) and legal (Nelson 2009; Troutt 2009) research predicts that the election will have little effect, or potentially a negative impact, on efforts to achieve racial parity in America. To assess what President Obama’s election means for American race relations, this study examines multiple measures of prejudice among Whites as predictors of their support for racial equality. Using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), I examine different forms of racism, and the extent to which they influence Whites’ support of government policies that promote racial equality. The focal independent variable, racial ideology, is measured by old-fashioned racism, systemic racism, symbolic racism, laissez-faire racism, and color-blind racism. The focal dependent variable, race-based policy preferences, is measured through support for government policies which promote racial equity in education and employment contexts. Factor analysis is used to identify how Whites’ feelings towards Obama, reaction to Obama’s election victory, feelings towards Blacks, outlook on black presidents in general, and beliefs concerning political power differentials between Blacks and Whites relate to different theoretical racial ideologies. Racial orientations that are indicated by measured variables then serve as focal independent variables in multiple regression analysis to predict the focal outcome variables concerning support for policies that foster racial equality. Factor analysis and regression analysis are conducted with pre-election, post-election, and recent data in order to assess change in Whites’ racial attitudes and policy preferences at various points in time. Results from the analysis suggest differences before and after the election in terms of racist ideology and support for programs that benefit racial minorities. Whites are now less likely to agree with the implementation of affirmative action and government policy supporting racial equality. Systemic and color-blind racist ideologies are the strongest predictors of opposition to race-based policy. Furthermore, it seems antiracist ideology has diminished since President Obama was elected. These findings are consistent with sociological and political research that suggests Whites’ opposition to racial policies and black candidates is often more influenced by symbolic racism than by realistic self-interest (Sears and Henry 2003) and confirms predictions (Bonilla-Silva and Ray 2009; Metzler 2010) that Obama’s presidency coupled with new forms of racism, such as color-blind racism, may serve to negatively affect racial equality in the United States.

Race-based medicine is the belief that people of different races have different biological characteristics that affect the diseases they are prone to, and the types of treatments and procedures that should be used. This belief is reflected in medical education, clinical practice, and research. Race-based medicine was born from slavery. Notions of biological difference between races were used to justify slavery, and the structural racism that was a product of the slavery era gave rise to race-based medicine. Despite the common belief that medicine is evidence-based and objective, science and medicine reflect society, and thus are also flawed and biased. Medicine and medical education cannot be separated from the views of the dominant culture. The belief of today dictates the lens through which physicians and researchers look at patients, procedures, and treatments. Despite more and more evidence that there is no biological basis to our social construction of race, race-based medicine is still being taught in medical schools. Medical vignettes and the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) display questions that encourage the normalcy of whiteness, reinforce stereotypes, and emphasize that diseases are race-specific. Race-based medicine is dangerous; not only is the concept unscientific and based in, the belief is also a source of trauma for minority students and residents. How does one cope with the daily assault of information that your race is a risk factor for many diseases, a justification for treating you differently, or that your fellow physicians are being trained to believe that the amount of melanin in your skin is enough information upon which to base assumptions? Instead of desperately searching for innate racial differences, society needs to change their focus to social determinants of health. We are chasing the rabbit hole of biological racial differences, but ignoring social determinants and structural racism, which distracts us from achieving health equity. / Urban Bioethics

Racial trauma is linked to issues such as psychological distress, lower well-being, anxiety, and depression. The present research investigated some of the potential effects of viewing overt instances of racially violent media on trauma and, in general, on the psychological well-being of individuals. Specifically, the present study utilized physiological and psychological measures to explore how different racial groups on college campuses are impacted by exposure to vicariously traumatizing stimuli when the victim is either an in-group or an out-group member. The present study posited that higher ethnic-racial identity can serve as a buffer to the deleterious effects of racial trauma. In addition, this study explored the role that ethnic-racial identity of the perceiver plays in this relationship. Findings indicate that Black students exhibited the greatest level of emotional arousal in response to both the neutral and negative video depicting a police officer. Black students were also more likely to watch or be exposed to vicarious, racially traumatizing content. Additionally, greater ethnic-racial salience was associated with increased physiological response to both neutral and negative, video content depicting police officers.

No description available.

As social creatures, our social encounters matter. They matter for how we experience the world, as well as ourselves. The role of psycho-social experiences has recently been recognized in the neurocognitive literature on the sense of agency. Defined as the experience of control over one’s actions and outcomes, researchers have begun exploring how social interactions and contextual cues modulate this experience, using an implicit task known as intentional binding. This task claims to capture the sense of agency by assessing differences in perception of time across conditions that are theoretically considered to be higher in sense of agency as compared to those that are lower. Drawing inspiration from this new literature, this thesis explores, across five studies, the impact of different psycho-social experiences, particularly those related to stigmatized racial minority groups, on the sense of agency. Our first two studies (n= 36, n=123) indicate that reflection on both negative and positive psycho-social experiences, including racial stigma, bias, and acceptance, reduces the sense of agency, as indexed by lower action-effect interval estimates. Further, our latter three studies (n=45, n=44, n=44), which focus on North American and international samples, suggest that expectations of racial bias reduce the sense of agency and that this reduction is greatest amongst people who experience a threat to their identity because of the event, as well as people who are low-self monitors. Insights from these studies are used to advance neurocognitive and social cognitive work, including psycho-social modulates of intentional binding and psychological mechanisms that affect racial minorities. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / One of the most fascinating aspects of human consciousness is our ability to feel in control of our actions and their outcomes. This experience, better known as a sense of agency, allows us to distinguish our own actions from others and feel responsible for the events we cause in the world. As an important psychological phenomenon, many researchers have taken an interest in understanding how this experience is shaped within our subjective minds. This work has revealed that individual characteristics, as well as social/environmental processes, can affect the sense of agency, at times, even disrupting/impairing the experience. Extending these early findings, this thesis aims to explore the role of psycho-social factors, namely, racial stigma, on the sense of agency. Across five experiments, we reveal that race-based experiences, including perceived and expected racial bias as well as racial acceptance, decrease the sense of agency. With replication and further inquiry, these studies have important implications for the neurocognitive and social-cognitive literature, as well as society at large.

This study unites the burgeoning academic field of exhibition histories and the critiques of race-based exhibition practices that crystallised in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. It concerns recent practices of presenting and contextualising black creativity in British publicly funded art museums and galleries that are part of a broader attempt to increase the diversity of histories and perspectives represented in public art collections and exhibitions. The research focuses on three concurrent 2010 exhibitions that aimed to offer a non-hegemonic reading of black creativity through the use of non-art-historical conceptual and alternative curatorial models: Afro Modern (Tate Liverpool), Action (The Bluecoat), and a retrospective of works by Chris Ofili (Tate Britain). Comparative exhibitions of the past were typically premised on concepts of difference that ultimately resulted in the notional separation of black artists from mainstream discourses on contemporary art and histories of British art. Through a close and critical textual analysis of these three recent exhibitions, which is informed by J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts (1955), the study considers whether, and to what extent the delimiting curatorial practices of the past have been successfully abandoned by public art museums and galleries, and furthermore, whether it has been possible for British art institutions to reject the entrenched, exclusive conceptions of British culture that negated black contributions to the canon and narratives of British art in the first place. The exhibition case studies are complemented and contextualised by an in-depth history of the Bluecoat’s engagement with black creativity between 1976 and 2012, which provides a particular insight into the ways that debates about representation, difference and separatism have impacted the policies and practices of one culturally significant art gallery that is frequently overlooked in histories of black British art. With reference to the notion of legitimate coercion as defined by Zygmunt Bauman (2000), the study determines that long-standing hegemonic structures continue to inform the modes through which public art museums and galleries in Britain curate and control black creativity.

No description available.

No description available.