Tracy DeHart

Do Unto Others as Others Have Done Unto You? Perceiving Sexism Influences Women’s Evaluations of Stigmatized Racial Groups

The present research examines how making discrimination salient influences stigmatized group members’ evaluations of other stigmatized groups. Specifically, three studies examine how salient sexism affects women’s attitudes toward racial minorities. White women primed with sexism expressed more pro-White (relative to Black and Latino) self-report (Studies 1 and 3) and automatic (Study 2) intergroup bias, compared with White women who were not primed with sexism. Furthermore, group affirmation reduced the pro-White/antiminority bias White women expressed after exposure to sexism (Study 3), suggesting the mediating role of social identity threat. Overall, the results suggest that making discrimination salient triggers social identity threat, rather than a sense of common disadvantage, among stigmatized group members, leading to the derogation of other stigmatized groups. Implications for relations among members of different stigmatized groups are discussed.

Including Others in the Implicit Self: Implicit Evaluation of Significant Others

We argue that people include significant others in their implicit self-concepts. That is, peoples implicit evaluations of their significant others are related to their own self-evaluations. Data from five different samples supported this idea by demonstrating that peoples implicit self-esteem is related to their implicit evaluations of their close others (both implicit self-esteem and implicit evaluations of significant others were assessed using the name-letter measure). This finding held for parent–child, romantic, and sibling relationships as well as for friendships. This finding also held controlling for peoples explicit self-esteem and how much people liked letters in general. These findings suggest that people include significant others in their implicit self-concepts, which appear to be distinct representations from peoples explicit beliefs. The potential implications for relationship functioning are discussed.

A Diary Study of Daily Perceived Mistreatment and Alcohol Consumption in College Students

A 30-day college student diary study examined daily perceptions of mistreatment, state ego-depletion, and evening alcohol consumption. We found that on days college students reported being ego-depleted, the more negative mistreatment experiences they reported during the day the more they drank that evening. In addition, negative mistreatment experiences were positively related to binge drinking on days students were high in ego-depletion but were negatively related to binge drinking on days students were low in ego-depletion. Perceiving mistreatment leads to increased drinking only on days that people do not have the cognitive resources to cope with being discriminated against more adaptively.

Drinking to belong: The effect of a friendship threat and self-esteem on college student drinking

Abstract The current study examined how implicit and explicit self-esteem and time spent drinking with friends influence college student drinking after a friendship threat manipulation. Poisson regression analyses revealed that students with low implicit self-esteem showed a greater increase in alcohol consumption when drinking with friends after experiencing a friendship threat than in the control condition. These effects were not found among students with high implicit self-esteem. A similar, but weaker, pattern emerged when testing the independent effects of explicit self-esteem. We suggest that low self-esteem students are drinking because they lack the self-resources to deal with unmet belongingness needs. These findings suggest that low implicit self-esteem may be a risk factor for college student drinking.

Does Stress Explain the Effect of Sleep on Self-Control Difficulties? A Month-Long Daily Diary Study

Insufficient sleep is linked to increased stress and suboptimal self-control; however, no studies have examined stress as a reason for why sleep affects self-control. Moreover, it is unknown if there are individual differences that make people vulnerable to this dynamic. Daily diary entries from 212 university students across 30 days were used in a multilevel path model examining if stress explained how prior night sleep affected next-day self-control difficulties and exploring if individual differences in sleep duration, stress, or self-control qualified this effect. Increased stress partially mediated of the effect of reduced sleep duration on increased next-day self-control difficulty. Moreover, short sleep increased next-day stress more for individuals with higher typical stress. Daytime stress especially amplified self-control difficulty for individuals with shorter typical sleep duration. Findings implicate stress as a substantial factor in how sleep loss undermines self-control and identify individuals particularly susceptible to this effect.