Community Violence Exposure and Hostile Attribution Bias: Moderating Effects of Racial Attitudes and School Diversity

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Abstract

Community violence exposure (CVE) is linked to more negative interpretations about others’ intentions (Cavete & Orue, 2011). Furthermore, negative attributions are also influenced by one’s attitudes about others (Yeager et al., 2013). Given the prominence of anti-Black sentiment in society as a whole (Clemans & Graber, 2016), we posited that children’s negative attitudes towards Blacks could magnify the impact of CVE on hostile attributions about ambiguous peer situations. Moreover, we expected this moderating effect to be particularly robust as children’s interactions with Black peers increased, given evidence of associations between negative racial judgments and peer interactions (Margie et al., 2005). Thus, we evaluated both individual and interactive relations of children’s CVE and negative racial attitudes with children’s hostile attribution biases, as further moderated by the proportion of Black students in the child’s school. We hypothesized that CVE would predict more hostile attribution bias toward peers, and this relation would be magnified among children who held more negative attitudes toward Black peers, particularly when the diversity of their school setting was greater with regard to the proportion of Black students.
Participants were 174 6-year-old children and their primary caregivers (Mage = 73.24 months, SD = 2.33; 48.9% female; 8% white, 17.8% Black, 47.7% Latinx, 26.4% multiracial). Caregivers reported on the child’s CVE prior to age 6 (e.g., hearing gunshots, witnessing physical fighting). Racial attitudes were assessed using an adapted version of the Racial Attitudes Measure (Williams, 1977; Bernat & Balch, 1979; Beale, 1996) wherein children were asked match 22 descriptors (e.g., has a lot of friends; 50% negative descriptions) to one of four gender-matched dolls representing white, Black, Asian, and Latinx phenotypes. Hostile attributions toward peers were assessed through children’s responses to 8 video vignettes (e.g., one child knocked over the other’s blocks; Schultz et al., 2010). The percentage of Black students in the child’s school was obtained from the Department of Education. Children’s ethnicity-race was controlled in all analyses.
There was no significant main effect of CVE on hostile attribution bias. There was a significant main effect of children’s negative attitudes toward Blacks on their hostile attribution bias (b = .242, SE = .104, p = .021). Critically, there was a significant three-way interaction between children’s CVE, anti-Black attitudes, and percentage of Black peers (b = 4.678, SE = .2.388, p =.018). Specifically, CVE predicted hostile attribution biases to peers when children indicated more negative attitudes toward the Black doll and had a higher percentage of Black peers in school (Figure 1).
Our findings suggest that CVE may take on different meaning depending on individual racial attitudes and the diversity of one’s social milieu. Children’s CVE was related to more hostile attribution biases when children held negative attitudes about Black individuals and had more contact with Black peers. This is important because Black youth may be placed at a disadvantage if their peers negatively interpret their actions based on previous experiences of witnessing violence. Hostile attribution bias could also forecast later vulnerabilities for children in other domains of socio-emotional development.

Authors

• Aaliyah Churchill, California State University - Northridge
  Presenting Author

• Ana Kamille Marcelo, Clark University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sara R. Berzenski, California State University - Northridge
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tuppett M. Yates, University of California - Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author