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Race and Racialized Identity: Social and Personality Pillar
Resources to help broaden representation related to race and racialized identity across the social and personality pillar of APA’s National Standards for High School Psychology Curricula
Research summaries
Suggested instructions: These research summaries can be incorporated into a lecture or shared with students as a reading to demonstrate how psychological science explores the diversity of human experience. These resources can also be used to encourage students to identify the major components of a research study (i.e., the hypothesis or study question, sample, method, and findings). Students can be asked to identify potential limitations of the study and encouraged to discuss the implications for our understanding of human behavior. Keywords highlight how concepts within and across pillars are incorporated into a single research study.
Sample research summaries
Acquiring group bias: Observing other people’s nonverbal signals can create social group biases
Researchers find children can quickly and easily learn biases based on subtle actions from close adults
Building biases in infancy: The influence of race on face and voice emotion matching
Researchers investigate whether infants’ ability to recognize emotions on faces is influenced by race and age
Who is prejudiced, and toward whom? The big five traits and generalized prejudice
Meta-analysis seeks to uncover whether certain personality traits contribute to prejudice against others
Experiences of racism and subjective cognitive function in African American women
Study suggests psychological trauma, such as that arising from racism, can alter cognitive function and memory
Psychologist profiles
Suggested instructions: These profiles can be shared with students to enhance the visibility of psychologists of diverse backgrounds. As an additional activity, students can be asked to conduct research to learn more about the psychologist and their work. An alternative assignment could be to ask students to find other psychologists of diverse backgrounds whose work falls into this content pillar. Keywords highlight how psychological scientists study concepts within and across pillars.
Sample psychologist profiles
This renowned psychologist studies how grit contributes to academic achievement
A national leader whose research is focused on reducing policing inequities
An award-winning psychologist who studies the impact of immigration on Asian American adolescents
His groundbreaking work on stereotype threat has considerable implications for education
The development of resources to broaden diversity and representation in the teaching of high school psychology resources is an APA Committee of Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools initiative supported by funding from the American Psychological Foundation David and Carol Myers Fund. This resource was developed by Eric Castro, Shawn C.T. Jones, PhD, Allyn Olsen, and Catherine Sanderson, PhD.
Date created: August 2023