Examining the consequences of exposure to racism for the executive functioning of Black students

Recent research has demonstrated that interracial interactions, reminders of stigmatized identities, and exposure to ambiguous racism can deplete the self-control resources of minority group members. In the current study we examined whether hearing blatant racism expressed in an interracial context would deplete the self-control of Black participants and whether this depletion would be moderated by participants’ level of racial centrality. After listening to a Black or a White confederate express either support for racial profiling (racist condition) or increased campus parking fees (neutral condition), Black participants completed a Stroop color-naming task to assess self-control depletion. Participants experienced self-control depletion following interracial encounters, regardless of whether the views expressed were racist. As expected, however, racial centrality moderated the depletion effect when racism was involved, with participants higher in centrality showing greater depletion following an encounter with racism from a White partner.     

Intentional embarrassment: a look at embarrassors' and targets' perspectives

Two thousand, one hundred and seven participants recounted situations in which they intentionally embarrassed another person (embarrassor accounts) or in which they perceived that they were intentionally embarrassed (target accounts). Specifically, this paper focused on differences in individuals' accounts of: (1) embarrassors' goals; (2) embarrassors' goal achievement; and (3) the degree of embarrassment felt by targets from embarrassors' and targets' perspectives. We asked 1136 participants to report a situation when they intentionally embarrassed another person. We asked another 971 participants to report a situation when they perceived that they were intentionally embarrassed by someone. Chi-square tests revealed strong effects for the perspective of the respondents on goals attempted and goals achieved. As expected, embarrassors were more likely than targets to report using embarrassment to negatively sanction another's behavior; targets were more likely than embarrassors to report that the embarrassors attempted the goal of self-satisfaction; embarrassors were more likely than targets to report that they were successful at achieving their goal; and embarrassors reported lower levels of target embarrassment than did targets. Implications and suggestions for future research are provided.