Article summary with Concerns about appearing prejudiced get under the skin: Stress responses to interracial contact in the moment and across time by Trawalter a.o. - 2012

Diversity is a good thing. People can improve their racial attitudes, leadership skills and their thinking about the social world. Still, there are many people who feel uncomfortable with diversity and want to live in a non-diverse area. Some people might even find interracial contact stressful and try to avoid this. However, it is almost impossible to avoid interracial contact. In this study the consequences of White individuals’ concerns about appearing prejudiced are examined.

People are sometimes afraid to show prejudiced behaviour, because they think that they are going to be rejected. It is not that they don’t want to be prejudiced, it’s that they don’t want to be viewed negatively. So interracial prejudice might be really stressful for people who are high in external motivation to respond without prejudice. Sometimes anxious people also react weird towards other groups when they are distressed. They get stressed because they don’t want to react prejudiced, but when they are stressed they may react really prejudiced towards Blacks. This research focuses on how appearing prejudiced creates stress responses to interracial contact and this will focus on external motivation to respond unprejudiced. The researchers think that people high on EM (external motivation) will experience more stress during interracial contact than people low on EM. This will be evident in behaviour and psychological responses. They also think that high-EM individuals will experience more stress over time the more interracial contact they have.

The researchers examined stress by looking at the body posture, facial expressions, blinking, adverted eye gaze and other nonverbal cues. They also measured physiological reactivity. The external motivation to respond unprejudiced was measured with a scale: the Motivation to Respond without Prejudice Scale. Participants had to react with a research assistant and the research assistant could be either white or black. He or she asked the participant some questions. This is the interaction. The whole study was filmed, so researchers could look at the nonverbal behaviour of participants. The hypothesis was supported: the higher people were on EM, the bigger stress responses they showed. They also showed more physiological stress responses.

The second study looked whether these results could be found in natural settings and over a large time period. Researchers decided to study college students, because they have more interracial contact. They did this over a time span of a year and the students needed to keep an online diary in which they had to answer what their mood was, how many hours they have slept, whether they took some caffeine and other things. They also had to list five people they had the most meaningful interactions that day. They also had to provide some information about the interracial partner. They also had to provide some saliva a couple of times. This was to measure their stress levels. These results also supported the hypothesis. Students, who were higher in EM, were more likely to have chronic stress.