Discrimination’s effects on sleep
Funded by the NIH, our current work examines how experiences with emotion invalidation contribute to discrimination’s damaging effects on sleep.
Group-based Social Pain Biases
Hurtful interpersonal experiences (e.g., rejection, disrespect, unfairness) are a sad, but all too common aspect of social life. Our lab considers how the stereotypes people hold of others can lead people to minimize the hurts of their peers and coworkers. For example, beliefs that adversity has made Black Americans tougher than White Americans sounds positive (being tough is good, right?), but paradoxically contributes to the minimization of Black Americans’ hurts. Since they believe hurtful experiences are less painful for Black relative to White persons, these biases lead people to provide less care and social support for their Black friends, colleagues, and clients. In addition to race and ethnicity, our lab considers how a range of identity-based stereotypes (e.g., mental health, gender, weight, career) shape judgments of others.
Emotion Invalidation and Social Pain Minimization
Running in tandem to our work on perpetrator biases, we also consider how first-person experiences with social stigma contributes to feelings of emotion invalidation for members of stereotyped groups. For example, stemming from stereotypes and dehumanizing judgments, Black Americans, Asian and Asian-American workers, and heavier individuals all report greater levels of emotion invalidation than peers from other groups and these encounters with pain minimization contribute to worse outcomes at work (e.g., greater burnout, defensive silence, lower job satisfaction) and poorer health (e.g., greater symptoms of depression, anxiety, poor sleep, and suicidality) . Our lab considers how emotion (in)validation acts as a mechanism linking social stigma, mistreatment, and poor life outcomes.