Seeing Anger When It Does Not Exist: Anger Bias imposed on 4th and 5th Grade Children

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

It is important for children to be understood by their teachers, however, research suggests that pre-service teachers are more likely to mistake anger in the faces of Black children than White children (Halberstadt et al., 2020). Anger bias, seeing anger when it does not exist, toward children has been demonstrated in pre-service teachers (Halberstadt et al., 2020) and parents (Cooke & Halberstadt, under review). The current study sought to (a) replicate this finding with teachers in the classroom with ample experience with students and (b) understand how racial biases are associated with anger bias. Given past research, we hypothesized that in-service teachers, like pre-service teachers, would be more likely to misattribute anger toward Black children than Black children and that this effect would be exacerbated by teachers’ own racial biases.
Participants. We recruited 43 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers from racially diverse classrooms in seven schools (86% female, 83.7% White, mean age = 37.4 years [SD = 9.49]). Teachers took the PerCEIVED task (Halberstadt et al., 2020) in which they were presented with 60 video portrayals by child actors creating one of five (happy, sad, surprise, fear, disgust) FACS-code validated emotional expressions. Each emotional expression extends across two rounds: the first showing an expression from neutral to low intensity and the second displaying slightly more intensity. To test for anger bias, we coded any selection of anger as “1” and all other selections as “0”. We assessed explicit bias using the REACT scale (Halberstadt & Oertwig, 2019) and implicit bias using the AMP (Payne et al., 2005).
Results. We found a significant effect of child gender on anger bias (OR = 0.73, CI = 0.60, 0.88, p = .001), suggesting teachers misperceived more anger in boys than girls, but no main effect of race or interaction between race and gender of the child. There was no significant interaction between teachers’ explicit bias and the race/gender of the child. However, the significant three-way interaction between teachers’ implicit bias and the race and gender of the child (OR = 0.03, CI = 0.00, 0.40), indicated that teachers who were high in implicit bias were 1.57 times more likely to misperceive anger in Black boys than in White boys (CI = 1.08, 2.28, p = .02), but responded similarly to Black and White girls (p > .05).
Discussion. These results indicate that teachers are more likely to misperceive anger in boys than girls. This effect is exacerbated by teachers’ implicit bias against Black boys. Because teachers with implicit bias demonstrate anger bias against Black boys, it may be that the combined effects of anger bias and racial bias contribute to the disproportionate discipline observed in schools (Okonofua & Eberhardt, 2015).

Authors

• Alison N Cooke, Duke University
  Presenting Author

• Amy Halberstadt, North Carolina State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Courtney Hagan, North Carolina State University
  Non-Presenting Author