CAREER: SBP: Understanding Emotion Regulatory Flexibility among African American Adolescents

最近针对非裔美国人的暴力事件引发了抗议活动，并使人们更加关注非裔美国青年及其家庭在美国几代人所面临的种族主义。研究报告称，大多数非洲裔美国青年在其一生中都会经历种族主义，这些经历增加了他们负面生活结果的风险，例如精神和身体健康状况不佳以及学业成绩不佳。非裔美国青年如何管理他们的种族主义经历，以防止这种负面结果？这项研究探讨了非洲裔美国青年如何发展一种特殊形式的情感能力，称为情感调节灵活性，以保护自己免受种族主义的影响。当互动不顺利时，他们可能会注意到信号，然后使用这些信号来调整他们表达和管理情绪的方式，以便其他人不会将他们视为愤怒或威胁。本研究为情绪调节灵活性作为一种具有可塑性和文化背景的情绪相关能力提供了一个新的视角。非裔美国青年是如何发展这种自我保护的情感能力的？这个问题是通过与非裔美国青年和他们的父母做研究，并结合生理和自我报告的措施来解决。这种独特的方法提供了对种族主义情绪反应的主观和客观指标，并捕捉了非裔美国青年用来管理这些情况的社会线索。这项研究还包括亲子互动，以揭示父母如何与孩子讨论这些问题。该项目为来自不同种族背景的年轻科学家提供培训经验，使他们了解如何与非裔美国人社区合作，解决种族主义对青年的影响，并帮助非裔美国人青年认识到他们的积极情感技能，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Recent instances of violence targeting African Americans has sparked protests and greater attention to the racism that African American youth and their families have faced for generations in the United States. Studies report that most African American youth will experience racism during their lifetimes, and these experiences increase their risk for negative life outcomes, such as poor mental and physical health and less academic success. How do African American youth manage their experiences with racism to protect against such negative outcomes? This research examines how African American youth develop a specific form of emotional competence, called emotion regulatory flexibility, to protect themselves from racism. They may attend to cues that signal when an interaction is not going well, and then use these signals to adjust how they express and manage their emotions so that others do not perceive them as angry or threatening. This research provides a novel perspective on emotion regulatory flexibility as a form of emotion-related competence that is malleable and culturally situated. How do African American youth develop such self-protective emotional competence? This question is addressed by doing research with both African American youth and their parents, and by combining physiological and self-report measures. The unique approach provides subjective and objective indicators of emotional reactions to racism and captures the social cues that African American youth use to manage these situations. The research also includes parent-child interactions to reveal how parents discuss these issues with their children. This project provides training experiences for junior scientists from various racial backgrounds in how to work with the African American community to address the effect of racism on youth, and can help African American youth recognize their positive emotion skills.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.