A Study of African Americans’ Physiological, Psychological and Political Responses to Racially Traumatic Stressful Events

Undergraduate #92
Discipline: Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
Subcategory: Physiology and Health

Jasmine Jackson - Jackson State University
Co-Author(s): Jeremy Anderson, Alexis Armstrong, Jauan Knight, and Kalen Orey, Jackson State University, Jackson, MS

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Due to the recent killings of unarmed African Americans by police officers, many organizations have expressed their outrage by protesting. Some protests have been peaceful, while others have escalated to violent riots. For this study, we categorize and discuss these events a Racially Traumatic Stressful Events (RTSEs). In this research, we will employ an experimental research design using various stimuli that will include a continuum of headlines of newspaper articles ranging from low threat to high threat scenarios featuring coverage of Baltimore, MA and Ferguson, MO. There is one headline that reads, ‘Streets Flare Up: Police attempt to control Boston/Ferguson’ and three pictures that accompany the headline and a control that shows just the headline without a picture. The three pictures that accompany the headline are as follows: 1) shows a young black male throwing a rock, 2) a white police officers pointing at black protesters, 3) a man vandalizing a police vehicle by jumping on it. The newspaper will be shown to a group of individuals to determine if blacks who possess high racial identities and those who possess high negative racial attitudes respond physiologically differently to stimuli with black protesters behaving violently and white police officers responded violently. The participants will be shown either the newspaper headline or a two minute video that shows the same three scenarios depicted by the pictures. BioPac equipment will be used to gauge whether the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems is activated while watching or looking at the stimuli. As it relates to politics, we will examine whether attitudes works in tandem with physiological responses to impact American identity among African Americans.

Funder Acknowledgement(s): National Science Foundation

Faculty Advisor: Byron D. Orey, byron.d.orey@jsums.edu

Role: I conducted some of the physiological experiments. I was more heavily involved with the completion of the research paper. I oversaw this process and gathered and analyzed a large amount of the literature for the paper. I also assisted my co authors in completing and revising their sections of the paper.