Over half a century has passed since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, yet racism and discrimination still deeply permeate our society. In 2011, APF awarded its Visionary Grant to Lisa Kiang, PhD, to better understand the physiological effects of racism.
Kiang, a faculty fellow at the University of North Carolina, along with co-principal investigator Terry Blumenthal, PhD, sought to connect social and emotional experiences of discrimination to physical responses and examine how they may be moderated by an individual's resilience to discrimination. Kiang studied a sample of college students from ethnically diverse backgrounds by capturing startle eyeblink reactions (an indicator of basic neurological functioning) to overt racial rejection, subtle racial rejection and racial acceptance images.
With APF's support, Kiang was able to demonstrate that the startle eyeblink paradigm can be used as a sensitive measurement of neurological activity in response to being exposed to racial rejection and acceptance images. This unique approach was a step toward better understanding the social experiences of racism.
The study also unveiled some notable differences in resilience factors among her participants. For instance, participants who were highly sensitive about racial rejection and those who believed that other people do not value their group were less attentive to acceptance images and seemed to be negatively biased. This finding emphasizes the importance of perception and has implications for social interactions and well-being. "If individuals have a hard time processing acceptance, all they have left is rejection," explains Kiang. She firmly believes that this work opens many doors to the links among race, culture, social experiences and physiology.
Kiang has shared her findings through papers and poster presentations at the Society for Research in Child Development and is working to publish her findings and pursue additional funding to continue her work. "The Visionary Grant was monumental in providing me with the resources to collaborate on a project that is a bit outside of the box and unique from the type of survey or questionnaire approach that I typically take in my work," she says. "I was able to gain expertise in experimental procedures in general, as well as in the physiological measurement of reactivity more specifically."
