The Role of Racialized Emotion Socialization in Moderating the Negative Effects of Discrimination on Academic Adjustment

• In Event: 3-067 - Parenting, Racial Socialization, Emotion Regulation, & Psychosocial Outcomes in African American Youth

Integrative Statement

African American adolescents experience a higher frequency of racial discrimination from peers and adults in school relative to students of other races, which is associated with poor academic and psychosocial outcomes (e.g., Fisher et al., 2000; Seaton et al., 2008). Given the emotional reactivity and distress that adolescents experience in response to racial discrimination, Dunbar and colleagues (2017) proposed an integrative conceptual model of adaptive racial/ethnic and emotion socialization. Recent work has conceptualized the construct of racialized emotion socialization (RES; the ways parents respond to and teach their children about emotion in a racialized context) as an adaptive socialization strategy that African American parents use to prepare their children for the experience of racial discrimination (Lozada & Riley, 2018). The current study tests the RES construct within the Dunbar et al. (2017) conceptual model among African American parents and their adolescents. Specifically, African American parents’ supportive (problem focus, emotion focus, and expressive encouragement) and suppression (punishment and minimizing) RES were examined as moderators of the link between African American students’ racial discrimination experiences and their academic engagement. Additionally, supportive and suppression RES were examined as predictors of adolescents’ self-control behaviors.

Data from a sample of 210 African American parents (96% female) and their middle school adolescents (6th and 7th grade; 55% female) from a larger longitudinal study in the Midwest US were analyzed. African American parents reported on their endorsement of supportive and suppression responses to their children’s emotions during a racialized experience (e.g., racial teasing, individual and vicarious racial discrimination, tokenism; Lozada, 2014) and on their own experiences of racial discrimination. Adolescents reported on their school-based racial discrimination experiences, their self-control, and their academic engagement.

Two structural equation models (SEM), each modeling the role of supportive or suppression RES, were conducted in Stata 14.0 using full information maximum likelihood for missing data. Both models demonstrated acceptable model fit (χ2s=1.81-5.78, ps>.05, CFIs =.92-96, RMSEAs =.04-.07). As expected, adolescents’ racial discrimination experiences were negatively related to their school engagement (B=-.16, SE=.04, p<.001). Parents’ racial discrimination experiences were positively related to their suppression RES (B=.19, SE=.06, p=.014), but were unrelated to their supportive RES (B=.01, SE=.06, p=.931). Additionally, supportive RES was positively related to adolescents’ self-control (B=.16, SE=.08, p=.043); suppression RES was unrelated to self-control (B=-.04, SE=.08, p=.628). Finally, neither supportive RES nor suppression RES moderated relations between adolescents’ discrimination experiences and school engagement. However, adolescents’ self-control (as predicted by supportive RES) did moderate this relationship with an unexpected pattern; adolescents’ racial discrimination was related to less school engagement among adolescents who reported high self-control (see figure 1).

Findings suggest that the two types of RES operate in different ways in understanding the role of RES in contributing to adolescents’ adjustment in the face of discrimination. Additionally, the role of adolescents’ self-control in moderating relations between discrimination and adolescents’ adjustment may be more complicated than originally anticipated. Implications for future work testing Dunbar and colleagues’ (2017) model will be discussed.

Author

• Fantasy Lozada, Virginia Commonwealth University
  Presenting Author