Reciprocal Relationships Between Racial Discrimination, Sensitivity to Disrespect, and Aggression in African American Youth

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Abstract

Experiences of racial discrimination are associated with higher levels of psychosocial problems in African American adolescents, including aggression (Brody et al., 2006). Racial discrimination also increases paranoia among African Americans (Combs et al., 2006) and expectations of future discriminatory experiences (Herda, 2016; Krieger et al., 2005). These processes may also contribute to greater sensitivity to disrespect among youth who experience racial discrimination. Disrespect sensitivity refers to the tendency to view others’ behavior as disrespectful (McDonald & Asher, 2018), which may in turn be associated with increased aggressive tendencies (Miller, 2001). However, little is known about the prospective links between racial discrimination, sensitivity to disrespect, and aggression in adolescence. Thus, this study examines the reciprocal links between these constructs in African American youth.
Participants included 75 adolescents (52 % female, 97% African American) who were interviewed at two time points (Mage = 16.1 and 17.8 years). At both waves, adolescents reported on disrespect sensitivity (McDonald & Asher, 2018), on their experienced racial discrimination (Sellers et al., 2006; Williams & Williams-Morris, 2000) and on aggression (including physical, verbal, and relational aggression; Farrell et al., 2016). An autoregressive cross-lagged path model was tested in Mplus to investigate reciprocal relationships between racial discrimination, disrespect sensitivity, and aggression across the two time points using age, parental income, and gender as covariates.
The model was just-identified and thus had perfect fit. Within each time point, aggression was positively associated with both racial discrimination (beta=.34 and .51, p<.01) and disrespect sensitivity (beta=.24 and .30, p<.05). However, racial discrimination and sensitivity to disrespect were not related at either time point (beta=.05, p=.590; beta=.10, p=.384). Racial discrimination (beta=.53, p<.001) as well as aggression (beta=.59, p<.001) were stable over time, but disrespect sensitivity was not (beta=.14, p=.173). Results for the cross-lagged paths indicated that racial discrimination predicted increased sensitivity to disrespect over time (beta=.21, p=.027), but was unrelated to changes in aggression (beta=.10, p=.363). Interestingly, disrespect sensitivity predicted lower racial discrimination (beta=-.26, p=.010) but not changes in aggression (beta=-.09, p=.281). Aggression predicted increased disrespect sensitivity (beta=.29, p=.019) but no changes in racial discrimination (beta=.226, p=.146) over time (Figure 1).Results indicate that aggressive behavior and experiences of racial discrimination may lead to increased disrespect sensitivity in African American youth. Contrary to expectations, individuals that were more sensitive to disrespect at the age of 16 reported fewer experiences of racial discrimination at the age of 17, perhaps due to desensitization to racial discrimination. Additionally, both disrespect sensitivity and racial discrimination were associated with aggression at the ages 16 and 17, but neither predicted aggression over time. Together, these findings suggest that aggression may shape perceptions of disrespect more so than disrespect and discrimination contribute to aggression, at least over the span of 1-2 years. Future research should replicate these findings in larger samples and examine the potential reciprocal links between racial discrimination, disrespect sensitivity, and aggression over shorter periods of time.
 

Authors

• Carlos Napoleon Espinoza, University of Alabama, Birmingham
  Presenting Author

• Marlon Goering, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sylvie Mrug, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  Non-Presenting Author