The Effects of Emotion Regulation Strategies when Contending with Discrimination

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Discrimination is unfair negative treatment due to societal group membership, such as race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. Discrimination is a stressor that can harm mental and physical health, and opportunities for work and promotions. Previous research has found that discrimination can impair performance on cognitive tasks, which can lead to negative emotions, such as anxiety, despair, and anger. The present research examines novel approaches to regulate emotional reactions to discrimination. These approaches stem from research suggesting that reflecting on negative life events from a third-person, distanced point of view rather than from a personal, immersed point of view leads to better emotional outcomes. This complements findings with well-known models of emotion regulation, which suggest that distanced processing of emotional content lead to more positive outcomes than immersed processing. Dr. Jennifer Richeson at Yale University, examines multiple consequences of contending with experiences of group-based discrimination from a distanced versus immersed perspective. The project also tests a novel strategy to create positive emotional responses by having participants reflect on past discrimination that reveals the ways they or their group may have become stronger or benefitted from having had discrimination experiences in the past. Creating such redemption narratives about stressful events has been found to enhance well-being and may hold promise to promote well-being in the face of discrimination.The proposed work integrates research from affective, emotion regulation science, and social psychology to consider processes that give rise to the ill effects of discrimination. The research proposes that compared to holding an immersed perspective, holding a more distanced perspective enhances emotion regulation and emotional outcomes. Experiments examine the influence of different emotion-regulation strategies on emotional reactions, physiological arousal, and cognitive functioning, as well as the motivation to act on behalf of the group that has faced discrimination. The proposed seven experiments examine these dynamics among different societal groups that often face discrimination (e.g., racial/ethnic minorities, women), and an experiment examines the role of creating a redemption narrative on reducing some of the negative mental and physical outcomes of discrimination. Consequently, the results of this project are poised to unearth novel insights to inform current understanding of the effects of discrimination on individual well-being and societal social cohesion.