Steven O. Roberts

From Parental Involvement to Children's Mathematical Performance: The Role of Mathematics Anxiety.

This study examined whether childrens mathematics anxiety serves as an underlying pathway between parental involvement and childrens mathematics achievement. Participants included 78 low-income, ethnic minority parents and their children residing in a large urban center in the northeastern United States. Parents completed a short survey tapping several domains of parental involvement, and children were assessed on mathematics anxiety, whole number arithmetic, word problems, and algebraic reasoning. Research Findings: The results indicated that parents influence childrens mathematics achievement by reducing mathematics anxiety, particularly for more difficult kinds of mathematics. Specifically, the mediation analyses demonstrated that parental home support and expectations influenced childrens performance on word problems and algebraic reasoning by reducing childrens mathematics anxiety. Mathematics anxiety did not mediate the relationship between home support and expectations and whole number arithmetic. Practice or Policy: Policies and programs targeting parental involvement in mathematics should focus on home-based practices that do not require technical mathematical skills. Parents should receive training, resources, and support on culturally appropriate ways to create home learning environments that foster high expectations for childrens success in mathematics.

Racial identity and autonomic responses to racial discrimination

Several studies identify racial identity-the significance and meaning that individuals attribute to race-as a mitigating factor in the association between racial discrimination and adjustment. In this study, we employed a visual imagery paradigm to examine whether racial identity would moderate autonomic responses to blatant and subtle racial discrimination analogues with Black and White perpetrators. We recruited 105 African American young adults from a public, southeastern university in the United States. The personal significance of race as well as personal feelings about African Americans and feelings about how others view African Americans moderated autonomic responses to the vignettes. We use polyvagal theory and a stress, appraisal, and coping framework to interpret our results with an eye toward elucidating the ways in which racial identity may inform individual differences in physiological responses to racial discrimination.

Essentialism and Racial Bias Jointly Contribute to the Categorization of Multiracial Individuals

Categorizations of multiracial individuals provide insight into the psychological mechanisms driving social stratification, but few studies have explored the interplay of cognitive and motivational underpinnings of these categorizations. In the present study, we integrated research on racial essentialism (i.e., the belief that race demarcates unobservable and immutable properties) and negativity bias (i.e., the tendency to weigh negative entities more heavily than positive entities) to explain why people might exhibit biases in the categorization of multiracial individuals. As theorized, racial essentialism, both dispositional (Study 1) and experimentally induced (Study 2), led to the categorization of Black-White multiracial individuals as Black, but only among individuals evaluating Black people more negatively than White people. These findings demonstrate how fundamental cognitive and motivational biases interact to influence the categorization of multiracial individuals.

COMBINING DATA FROM MULTIPLE MONITORS IN AIR POLLUTION MORTALITY TIME SERIES STUDIES

In community time series studies on the effect of particulate air pollution on mortality, particulate air pollution data are often available from multiple monitors. Published studies have combined the data from the multiple monitors using a simple or trimmed average. In this paper, I describe an alternative method for combining the particulate air pollution data available from multiple monitors. Using time series data from Cook County, Illinois the proposed method yields more meaningful biologically plausible particulate air pollution mortality effect estimates without loss of statistical accuracy and reduces the full set of monitors to a smaller set without loss of information. The proposed monitor combination may be more highly correlated with the average population exposure to particulate air pollution than a simple or trimmed average of the monitors.

Multiracial Children's and Adults' Categorizations of Multiracial Individuals.

Research has explored how multiracial individuals are categorized by monoracial individuals, but it has not yet explored how they are categorized by multiracial individuals themselves. We examined how multiracial children (aged 4–9 years old) and adults categorized multiracial targets (presented with and without parentage information). When parentage information was provided, multiracial targets were more likely to be categorized as neither wholly Black nor wholly White. However, both multiracial adults and children more often categorized multiracial targets as Black than as White regardless of the absence or presence of parentage information. For multiracial children, increased contact with White people predicted the tendency to categorize multiracial targets as Black. These data suggest that multiracial children’s categorizations are more flexible than those of monoracial children in previous research and that the tendency to categorize multiracial targets as Black emerges early in development within multiracial samples and is especially likely in predominantly White contexts.

How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories

It is widely recognized that language plays a key role in the transmission of human culture, but relatively little is known about the mechanisms by which language simultaneously encourages both cultural stability and cultural innovation. This paper examines this issue by focusing on the use of language to transmit categories, focusing on two universal devices: labels (e.g., shark, woman) and generics (e.g., “sharks attack swimmers”; “women are nurturing”). We propose that labels and generics each assume two key principles: norms and essentialism. The normative assumption permits transmission of category information with great fidelity, whereas essentialism invites innovation by means of an open-ended, placeholder structure. Additionally, we sketch out how labels and generics aid in conceptual alignment and the progressive “looping” between categories and cultural practices. In this way, human language is a technology that enhances and expands the categorization capacities that we share with other animals.

Making Boundaries Great Again: Essentialism and Support for Boundary-Enhancing Initiatives:

Psychological essentialism entails a focus on category boundaries (e.g., categorizing people as men or women) and an increase in the conceptual distance between those boundaries (e.g., accentuating the differences between men and women). Across eight studies, we demonstrate that essentialism additionally entails an increase in support for boundary-enhancing legislation, policies, and social services, and that it does so under conditions that disadvantage social groups, as well as conditions that benefit them. First, individual differences in essentialism were associated with support for legislation mandating that transgender people use restrooms corresponding with their biological sex, and with support for the boundary-enhancing policies of the 2016 then-presumptive Republican presidential nominee (i.e., Donald Trump). Second, essentialism was associated with support for same-gender classrooms designed to promote student learning, as well as support for services designed to benefit LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) individuals. These findings demonstrate the boundary-enhancing implications of essentialism and their social significance.

Children’s descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency replicates (and varies) cross-culturally: Evidence from China

Research with U.S. samples found that children use descriptive group regularities (characteristics shared by individuals within a group) to generate prescriptive judgments (characteristics that should be shared by individuals within a group). Here, we assessed this descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency in a sample of children (ages 4-13years) and adults (ages 18-40years) from mainland China. Participants were introduced to novel groups (i.e., Hibbles and Glerks) who engaged in contrasting morally neutral behaviors (e.g., listening to different kinds of music) and then to conforming and non-conforming individuals (e.g., a Hibble who listened to music more typical of Glerks). Like U.S. children, Chinese children disapproved of non-conformity and rates of disapproval declined with age. However, compared with U.S. children, younger Chinese children (ages 4-6years) rated non-conformity more disapprovingly, and unlike U.S. adults, Chinese adults rated non-conformity more negatively than conformity. Moreover, compared with U.S. participants, Chinese participants across all age groups appealed more often to norm-based explanations when justifying their disapproval. These data provide a cross-cultural replication of childrens descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency but also reveal cross-cultural variation, and they have implications for understanding the mechanisms that underlie stereotyping and normative reasoning.

Children’s and Adults’ Predictions of Black, White, and Multiracial Friendship Patterns

ABSTRACT Cross-race friendships can promote the development of positive racial attitudes, yet they are relatively uncommon and decline with age. In an effort to further our understanding of the extent to which children expect cross-race friendships to occur, we examined 4- to 6-year-olds’ (and adults’) use of race when predicting other children’s friendship patterns. In contrast to previous research, we included White (Studies 1 and 2), Black (Study 3), and Multiracial (Study 4) participants and examined how they predicted the friendship patterns of White, Black, and Multiracial targets. Distinct response patterns were found as a function of target race, participant age group, and participant race. Participants in all groups predicted that White children would have mostly White friends and Black children would have mostly Black friends. Moreover, most participant groups predicted that Multiracial children would have Black and White friends. However, White adults predicted that Multiracial children would have mostly Black friends, whereas Multiracial children predicted that Multiracial children would have mostly White friends. These data are important for understanding beliefs about cross-race friendships, social group variation in race-based reasoning, and the experiences of Multiracial individuals more broadly.

Does this Smile Make me Look White? Exploring the Effects of Emotional Expressions on the Categorization of Multiracial Children

Previous research shows that Multiracial adults are categorized as more Black than White (i.e., Black-categorization bias), especially when they have angry facial expressions. The present research examined the extent to which these categorization patterns extended to Multiracial children, with both White and Black participants. Consistent with past research, both White and Black participants categorized Multiracial children as more Black than White. Counter to what was found with Multiracial adults in previous research, emotional expressions (e.g., happy vs. angry) did not moderate how Multiracial children were categorized. Additionally, for Black participants, anti-White bias was correlated with categorizing Multiracial children as more White than Black. The developmental and cultural implications of these data are discussed, as they provide new insight into the important role that age plays in Multiracial person perception.