Teachers’ Imposition of Anger Bias by Gender and Race, and the Role of Implicit Bias

• In Event: Emotion Understanding Across Development: Implications for Interpersonal and Educational Contexts

Abstract

Teachers’ ability to understand what children are feeling has implications for students’ sense of belongingness in school and strong student-teacher relationships (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Yet being understood is not equally experienced by children, with White girls’ emotions being recognized most accurately, even when their facial expressions are shown at similar levels of clarity as other children. Further, both Black boys and girls are misperceived as angry more than White boys and girls, even when no facial muscles associated with anger are shown (Cooke & Halberstadt, 2021; Halberstadt et al., 2020). These results suggest the presence of underlying beliefs or biases. To address this question, we examined accuracy skill and anger bias in-class teachers who have ample experience with students and explored how teachers’ implicit beliefs intersect with anger bias. Given previous evidence, we hypothesized that even in-class teachers would be more likely to misattribute anger toward Black children than White 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). Teachers were presented with 72 video portrayals by child actors creating one of six (happy, sad, surprise, fear, disgust, anger) FACS-code validated emotional expressions. Each emotional expression was shown twice as it formed: once as it developed from neutral to low intensity and once as it developed to slightly more intensity. To test for anger bias, we coded whenever teachers chose “anger” for the 60 non-angry faces. We assessed implicit bias using the AMP (Payne et al., 2005) and tested hypotheses with multi-level modeling.
Results. A significant effect for child gender (OR = 0.73, CI = 0.60, 0.88, p = .001) indicated that teachers misperceived anger more for boys than girls, but no main effect of race or interaction between child gender and race emerged. Implicit bias was relevant in that a significant three-way interaction between teachers’ implicit bias, child gender, and child race (OR = 0.03, CI = 0.00, 0.40), indicated that teachers 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); teachers low in implicit bias responded to children similarly across gender and race, with no significant effects.

Discussion. First, teachers were more likely to misperceive anger in boys than girls. Second, this effect was exacerbated by teachers’ implicit bias against Black boys. Because the children were not showing anger in their faces for these analyses, it appears that teachers more readily presume anger in boys than girls and, teachers revealing implicit bias are especially likely to presume anger in Black boys, even when none exists. The cumulative effects of anger bias and racial bias as well as qualitative data from the teachers will be discussed in the context of the disproportionate discipline observed in schools and Black boys’ failure to thrive in school.

Authors

• Alison N Cooke, Duke University

• Amy Halberstadt, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author

• Pamela Watkins Garner, George Mason University

• Kamilah Legette, University of Denver