Kristin J. Pauker, Ph.D. - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Kristin Pauker, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University whose research focuses on children's understanding of race-related knowledge and the impact of this understanding on behavior. Specific to this application, Dr. Pauker plans to study how children's understanding of race- related knowledge (e.g., discrimination) and nonverbal influences in their environment (e.g., nonverbal behavior depicted in the media) affect the emergence of interracial anxiety and racial segregation in children. Extant research has established links between discrimination and negative mental-health outcomes, particularly for minority children. Interracial friendships may provide one potential buffer against these negative outcomes through decreasing interracial anxiety and the overall prevalence of discrimination. However, despite continued efforts to improve race relations in America, interracial friendships often drastically decline around the 5th grade. The primary goal of this research is to examine what processes underlie this decline and subsequent self-segregation, and to uncover how to motivate children to approach interracial interactions with positive expectations. Dr. Pauker plans to conduct this research at Stanford University where she will work with experts in social development and race perception. Under the mentored phase, she will complete two studies. The first study tests whether children's understanding of discrimination fosters interracial anxiety and declines in interracial friendships in middle childhood. Specifically, it will measure the emergence of interracial anxiety in White and racial minority children ages 8-13 and examine the potential antecedents, behavioral correlates, and consequences of this anxiety as they emerge developmentally. Further, children's na[unreadable]ve or implicit lay theories about whether personality is fixed or can change should direct children's interaction expectations, behavior, and future motivations. The second study tests whether manipulating children's implicit lay theories can change their expectations, create positive interactions, and increase motivation for interracial contact and friendship formation. In the independent phase, a longitudinal study will be conducted to examine the contribution of discrimination understanding and implicit lay theories to changes in the trajectories of interracial anxiety and interracial friendships over this age-range. Moreover, a series of studies will be conducted to address whether such nonverbal anxiety can be conveyed through patterns of nonverbal behavior represented in children's environment (e.g., media, parents). The results of the entire set of studies will then inform a larger R01 application aimed at developing and testing an intervention to foster positive interracial interactions and increased interracial friendships. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Discrimination-often associated with decreased mental health for particularly racial minorities- becomes increasingly salient in middle childhood. The current research should help uncover how different strategies for coping with the threat of discrimination may (a) shape children's anxiety in interracial interactions and (b) influence the maintenance of interracial friendships, a potentially important buffer against the negative effects of discrimination. Additionally, it will test two potential ways to foster positive interracial interactions and increase interracial friendships, in order to curb negative pathways early on and promote positive development.

The number of Americans who self-identify as belonging to more than one race has grown to over 9 million, emerging as one of the fastest growing demographic groups in the United States. There has been much discussion, in both academic disciplines and public forums, about the impact of mixed-race population growth on peoples' stereotypes and prejudices about racial groups, and particularly how biracially-identified individuals may challenge underlying beliefs about racial categories themselves.

This project will examine the impact of exposure to biracial identified, racially ambiguous individuals on White perceivers' beliefs about social categories. Using a naturalistic longitudinal study of recent arrivals to Hawaii (a largely multiracial context) and a series of laboratory experiments in the U.S. mainland, this project tests whether Whites' exposure to biracially identified individuals causes Whites to believe that society is moving away from biological, discrete views of racial categories and to subsequently decrease their personal endorsement of essentialism. Moreover, this proposal tests two seemingly contradictory consequences of essentialist belief change. On the one hand, essentialism reduction should lead to more favorable attitudes towards racial minorities and less use of social categories in judgment. On the other hand, recognizing that society has become less essentialist may increase perceptions of racial equity and racial progress and lower support for diversity policies (e.g., affirmative action).

By identifying the positive and negative consequences of reduced essentialism and the conditions under which reductions occur, this project will aid in identifying potential intergroup interventions that involve naturally occurring challenges to essentialism (e.g., biracial exposure) and help us understand how they operate (e.g., through changing beliefs about societal norms and expanding individuals' cognitive flexibility).

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising scholar investigating how and why children come to endorse negative stereotypes for members of certain racial groups in early elementary school, and in particular, the role of teacher nonverbal behaviors in contributing to children's racial biases. Racial achievement gaps persist across the United States despite years of education research, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal programming, and countless teacher training programs. Early elementary school, when achievement gaps first emerge, is also the time when majority children begin to show racial bias, and when minority children are able to detect discrimination related to their membership in a particular social group. Therefore, school settings may play a key role in guiding children's racial biases. The goal of this research project is to examine one aspect of school settings that might contribute to children's early race biases: differences in teacher nonverbal behaviors toward members of different racial groups. This research will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences through including undergraduate research assistants from a variety of backgrounds in the research design, data collection, and analysis of this project, and through partnering with local educators and school programs to collect data and disseminate findings. Additionally, this research takes place in the community surrounding the University of Hawaii. This context provides a unique and understudied setting to analyze the emergence of children's racial bias in school because of the high level of diversity in most elementary classrooms, and the prevalence of racial group stereotypes and achievement gaps that exist in the community. Research on children's racial attitudes in this context is critical, not only to gain a better understanding of the racial tensions that exist in this specific community, but also to illuminate the processes that underlie the emergence of children's racial bias more broadly. Finally, by examining one possible source of children's early racial biases, this work could aid in the development of interventions designed to reduce or prevent children's biases when they first emerge and ultimately promote the academic success of students from stigmatized groups.

Although children begin to show racial bias and endorse racial stereotypes around the age of school entry the role of school settings in contributing to the emergence of these attitudes has gone largely untested. Previous research suggests that children are adept at using nonverbal information to make judgments about unfamiliar individuals and that nonverbal behaviors can guide children's attitudes for individuals from different racial groups. Moreover, researchers in education have found that teachers often differ in their nonverbal behaviors toward children from different racial groups. This research is the first to examine whether children might use teacher nonverbal behaviors to guide their racial attitudes. Study 1 determines whether young children use differential teacher treatment to guide their inferences about children from different groups using a novel groups design. Study 2 analyzes teacher behaviors toward students from different racial groups in relation to teachers' implicit bias and classroom diversity. Study 3 tests whether viewing positive teacher behaviors toward students from negatively stereotyped groups results in a reduction in children's racial biases. This research allows for a more complete understanding of the mechanisms that drive children's early racial biases and lays the groundwork for educational interventions designed to reduce or prevent these biases when they first emerge.

Within the first five years of life, children become adept at categorizing others into social categories, which has wide-ranging implications for children's perceptions and interactions with others. Yet much of what is known about how children process social categories is based on studies conducted with limited populations (in terms of only including children from certain race/ethnic, geographical, and socioeconomic backgrounds). By harnessing natural variation in exposure to diversity in different regions of the U.S. among children from different backgrounds, the current project will lead to a better understanding of how young children from throughout the United States conceptualize and reason about social categories. A second goal is to test the robustness of past results regarding children's social category understanding and to contribute to recent calls for transparency, reproducibility, and generalizability in science.

The project involves five sites (Hawaii, the Southwest, the Northwest, the Southeast, and the Northeast), with each site including 4- to 5-year-old children from multiple demographic backgrounds. The focus is on four core components of early social category knowledge: children's attitudes towards; prosocial behavior with; facial recognition of; and perceptions of status of members of different social categories. Children will complete a standardized protocol and task battery that assesses each of these components across all five geographic locations in the U.S. The research will examine whether results are reproducible across geographic regions that differ in their demographics. It will also investigate how individual tasks relate to each other within each child (e.g., the relationship between perceptions of status and behavior towards children from different groups). This approach will also allow tests of the robustness of past results regarding children's knowledge of social categories and will contribute to recent calls for transparency, reproducibility, and generalizability in science. This goal will be implemented by: (1) posting all study materials so that the exact methods can be implemented elsewhere; (2) posting all final data so that others can re-analyze the data; and (3) pre-registering the proposed analyses in line with recent recommendations for transparency in research. By achieving a better understanding of the origins of intergroup perceptions and attitudes, broader impacts are expected to support focused interventions that promote positive relations between different groups of people.