Discriminatory Context Research Articles

Examining the effectiveness of positive reappraisal in the context of discrimination.

Positive reappraisal has been shown to be a generally effective emotion regulation strategy associated with multiple indices of greater psychological functioning. There are, however, some emotion-eliciting events, such as discrimination, that may not lend themselves to favorable alternative interpretations or which have relatively fewer affordances. In such instances, a reappraisal strategy could lose its effectiveness. We conducted an experimental test of this hypothesized ineffectiveness of positive reappraisal within a discriminatory context. Participants were 404 Black and Latine college students randomly assigned to imagine being the recipient of a rude or discriminatory comment and immediately afterward were asked to either ruminate about or positively reappraise the event. Overall, positive reappraisal was more effective than rumination in downregulating anxiety and anger. However, a single-df contrast test revealed that positive reappraisal in response to the rude comment was significantly more effective in reducing anxiety relative to the other three conditions (average of positive reappraisal of the discriminatory comment or rumination to either the rude or discriminatory comment). Additional analyses also showed that oppressed minority ideology (OMI) moderated the utility of anger regulation such that, for those lower on OMI, positive reappraisal was most effective in regulating anger in response to discrimination (compared to all other conditions), but among those higher on OMI, rumination and reappraisal to discrimination were equally effective. Results suggest that the effectiveness of positive reappraisal is lessened in a discrimination context and that more robust strategies may be needed to deal with the emotional fallout from this unique stressor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Politics of African Heritage in Black Brazilian Women's Literature

This article explores the contemporary literature of Afro-Brazilian women writers Lívia Natália, Cristiane Sobral, and Cidinha da Silva to understand how they cope with the personal impact of various forms of racial discrimination. The analysis fleshes out the imaginative juxta-position of African heritage, diasporic Black identities, and discriminatory contexts, with an emphasis on literary representation and interpretation of African religious symbols such as Eshu and Pomba Gira and how such symbols underscore the survival of African cultures on Brazilian soil vis-àvis the history of Black subjectivity. Literature as antiracist armament used by Black female subjects testifies to their resilience and demonstrates how their transformational discourses are necessary to revise the historical epistemic violence of oppressive systems and to express their personal and collective identities.

Between a rock and a hard place: a study of everyday racism, racial discrimination, and racial microaggressions in contemporary Denmark

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore how individuals navigate in seemingly neutral contexts where discrimination occurs while it is simultaneously denied. We address how structural discrimination (implicit, underlying) is so deeply imbricated within day-to-day forms of communication, interaction, and within language, that it has become part of social normality and, as such, nearly invisible. Further, we argue that structural discrimination is part of a shared knowledge that must be negotiated and navigated within, but which changes with place and context. In the article, we dissect and explore some of the ambivalences embedded within racialized and discriminatory interactions. We do this in our discussion of the following: (1) Complex, shared underlying knowledge of discrimination which encompasses systematized stratifications of difference. (2) ‘A knowing the inside/being the outside position’ which, for some individuals, may contribute to challenges in regard to navigation within discriminatory contexts.

How Do Discrimination and Self-Esteem Control Beliefs Affect Prosociality? An Examination Among Black and Latinx Youth

Black and Latinx youth are situated in a maladaptive discriminatory context in the United States; however, prosociality may be one way that youth can promote their own positive development in the face of these experiences. We examined the longitudinal associations between discrimination and prosociality among 380 Black and Latinx early adolescents (MW6age = 12.38 years, 52% female) and considered race/ethnicity and self-esteem control beliefs as potential moderators to this association. Discrimination predicted higher levels of prosociality among Black youth 6 months later, but not among Latinx youth. Discrimination also predicted higher prosociality among youth with very high self-esteem control beliefs 6 months later, but not among youth with lower levels of self-esteem control beliefs. None of these associations were significant when looking across a 1-year time frame. Our findings support the predictions of self-esteem enhancement theory and highlight the importance of considering how youth’s unique racialized experiences can inform how they respond to discrimination.

Intermediation and discrimination in an investment game: An experimental study

Using a three-players’ variant of the investment game with different group identity, we investigate how participants who take decisions on behalf of other behave differently than the party directly involved in a discriminatory context. We provide evidence that pure intermediaries (individuals who make decision on behalf of “owners” and who do not risk their own resources) are more prone to discrimination than “owners” (players who make decisions for themselves). The cause of the discrimination we observe is not hostility toward out-group members but is mainly triggered by preferences for in-group members. It seems that because of their position, intermediaries can express their preferences for in-group members more easily than the owners, although they feel responsible for the resources with which they play. Moreover, our data suggest that owners are more prone to statistical considerations than intermediaries. Finally, we observe a gender effect among intermediaries: women invest significantly less than men.

La huella de Lee Krasner: determinación, posguerra y energía plástica

El tema central de este artículo es la obra de la pintora Lee Krasner, cuya producción artística, especialmente durante el periodo de posguerra, ha contribuido de forma sublime a forjar el triunfo del expresionismo abstracto en América. Además, partiendo de que aún existe un gran vacío en torno a su trabajo, tenemos la imperiosa necesidad de poner en liza la huella de una artista que se reveló contra los cánones sociales preestablecidos, para mostrar su determinación y voluntad artística como mujer en un contexto desigualitario que mantuvo en la sombra a su potencial creativo durante décadas. El recorrido narrativo de este artículo comienza con un primer apartado en el que se analiza el espíritu libre e independiente que caracterizó a la artista durante toda su vida, y continua indagando en el diálogo entre arte y vida de uno de los periodos de mayor trascendencia para Lee Krasner, el que vivió junto a su marido Jackson Pollock a partir de 1945 en Long Island. Por último, se aborda un tercer apartado que versa sobre su serie de pinturas denominada Little Images, que comenzó en 1946, un punto de inflexión en la madurez artística de Krasner, que influiría notablemente en su carrera artística y posterior reconocimiento en el mundo del arte.

Resilience among immigrant youth: The role of culture, development and acculturation

The resilient adaptation of immigrant youth in host societies is consequential for their wellbeing and for the prosperity of society. Significant diversity is observed in their adaptation. The key question of this article is “Who among immigrant youth does well and why?”. The adaptation of immigrant youth is examined in a developmental context, through the lens of culture, integrating acculturation and social psychological variables. Culture has been largely neglected in the study of resilience. However, both the definition of positive adaptation and the resources promoting it are to a large extent culture-bound. This argument becomes particularly relevant in the context of migration. Immigrant youth have to navigate between the often-conflicting values and developmental goals of their home and host cultures, in a discriminatory context. This review suggests that culture, development and acculturation are highly intertwined. A cultural developmental science approach would contribute to a better understanding of immigrant youth resilience.

The politics of counting and reporting conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence: the case of Myanmar

ABSTRACTScholars, states and international organizations have begun to systematically count, document and compare sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in conflict-affected countries. Qualitative and quantitative studies point to a “tip of the iceberg” phenomenon, where there is a high prevalence but low level of actual reporting of SGBV. We investigate the conditions in which SGBV is reported or, more significantly, is not reported to discover the trends of reporting in politically oppressive environments where SGBV is thought to be occurring. We ask how the power to report in local conflict-affected areas is affected by national political tensions and pervasive gender discrimination. Reporting of SGBV in Myanmar, a country that has experienced multiple, protracted conflicts since independence, is examined. Analysis of open-access reports over a fifteen-year period reveals a pattern of silence that we argue is rooted in pervasive discriminatory civil and physical practices against women. Engaging with the deeply politicized and gender discriminatory context of conflict-affected societies enables us to see the anomalies of SGBV data and to highlight significant gaps in our knowledge about SGBV.

Discriminatory Contexts, Emotions and Civic/Political Engagement among Native Italians and Migrants

AbstractWe assume that emotions (anger, shame and hope) mediate the relationship between perceiving a discriminatory context and civic/political engagement. Results of a survey with 1242 participants (mean age 20.7 years; 53% men; 32.8% migrants) showed that such emotions play a different role according to the type of engagement and the population (native Italians versus migrants). Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

High trait anxiety during adolescence interferes with discriminatory context learning

Persistent adult anxiety disorders often begin in adolescence. As emphasis on early treatment grows, we need a better understanding of how adolescent anxiety develops. In the current study, we used a fear conditioning paradigm to identify disruptions in cue and context threat-learning in 19 high anxious (HA) and 24 low anxious (LA) adolescents (12–17years). We presented three neutral female faces (conditioned stimulus, CS) in three contingent relations with an unconditioned stimulus (UCS, a shrieking female scream) in three virtual room contexts. The degree of contingency between the CSs and the UCSs varied across the rooms: in the predictable scream condition, the scream followed the face on 100% of trials; in the unpredictable scream condition, the scream and face appeared randomly and independently of each other; in the no-scream condition the CS was presented in the absence of any UCS. We found that the LA adolescents showed higher levels of fear-potentiated startle to the faces relative to the rooms. This difference was independent of the contingency condition. The HA adolescents showed non-differential startle between the CSs, but, in contrast to previous adult data, across both cue types displayed lowest startle to the unpredictable condition and highest startle to the no-scream condition. Our study is the first to examine context conditioning in adolescents, and our results suggest that high trait anxiety early in development may be associated with an inability to disambiguate the signalling roles of cues and contexts, and a mislabelling of safety or ambiguous signals.

The impact of pre-selected variance inflation factor thresholds on the stability and predictive power of logistic regression models in credit scoring

Standard Bank, South Africa, currently employs a methodology when developing application or behavioural scorecards that involves logistic regression. A key aspect of building logistic regression models entails variable selection which involves dealing with multicollinearity. The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of using different variance inflation factor (VIF) thresholds on the performance of these models in a predictive and discriminatory context and to study the stability of the estimated coefficients in order to advise the bank. The impact of the choice of VIF thresholds was researched by means of an empirical and simulation study. The empirical study involved analysing two large data sets that represent the typical size encountered in a retail credit scoring context. The first analysis concentrated on fitting the various VIF models and comparing the fitted models in terms of the stability of coefficient estimates and goodness-of-fit statistics while the second analysis focused on evaluating the fitted models' predictive ability over time. The simulation study was used to study the effect of multicollinearity in a controlled setting. All the above-mentioned studies indicate that the presence of multicollinearity in large data sets is of much less concern than in small data sets and that the VIF criterion could be relaxed considerably when models are fitted to large data sets. The recommendations in this regard have been accepted and implemented by Standard Bank.

From Masisi to Activists: Same-Sex Relations and the Haitian Polity

From Masisi to Activists: Same-Sex Relations and the Haitian Polity Thérèse Migraine-George While the inextricable connection between democracy and human rights has been well documented, it is also no coincidence that countries enjoying a high degree of socioeconomic stability and political liberalism are generally striving to achieve gender equality and, in some cases, have even legalized same-sex relationships. Indeed, the public ways in which bodies are represented, shaped, and disciplined undergird a complex interplay of social, political, and cultural ideologies that, in turn, reflect on the civic health of a nation or a community. Drawing on Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva among others, Judith Butler notably shows that the constitution of bodily margins and boundaries through which sexual others are both produced and “abjected” is based on an arbitrary yet regulatory differentiation between the “inner” and “outer.” This distinction undergirds homophobia as well as racism. As she puts it, “The boundary of the body as well as the distinction between internal and external is established through the ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a defiling otherness.”1 Moreover, the strategies used by sexual minorities to become more visible in the civic space, to move from the outer social margins to the inner public realm, significantly point toward the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that operate in any society, in regard not only to its sexual minorities but to disenfranchised groups in general. The margin, whether ethnic or sexual, is therefore a critical vantage point to observe the central functioning of power. In the context of Haiti, the status of people who engage in same-sex relations and the ways in which some organizations have recently begun to advocate more vocally for their rights are particularly significant in relation to ongoing efforts to build a sustainable democracy and to counter the pervasive anomy of the civic space. Although the integration of different sexual behaviors within Haitian Vodou has been highlighted, particularly in the 2002 documentary Of Men and Gods, people engaging in same-sex relations in Haiti are subjected to various forms of harassment [End Page 8] and stigmatization. Homophobia in post-earthquake Haiti has been further reinforced by the popular belief that Masisi—a derogatory term used to designate “effeminate” men in Haitian Kreyòl—provoke divine punishment in the form of natural disasters. It is within such a discriminatory context that a “gay rights” movement has recently emerged in Haiti.2 In May 2012, an “LGBT Congress,” which attracted over three hundred people and many nongovernmental organizations, took place in Port-au-Prince to mark the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia. In the words of one participating organization, Housing Works: The 2010 earthquake further devastated the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, so issues of basic survival can seem to trump the need for other kinds of advocacy. But the work for cultural and national acceptance of LGBT people in Haiti remains a struggle, and this conference is proof that the rebuilding of Haiti means houses, hospitals and schools, and social justice for marginalized groups within the country.3 One newly formed organization, Kouraj, also participated in the May 2012 Congress. On its website, the organization presents itself as “a group of masisi activists, created to politicize other homosexuals and transgender persons in Haiti regarding their fundamental human rights.”4 Interestingly, Kouraj decided to break away from the acronym LGBT in favor of the name “M Movement.” This is based on the Kreyòl terms Masisi, Madivin, Makomer, and Mix, which, the organization explains on its website, more accurately reflect the complex reality of same-sex practices in Haiti while resisting Western-imposed gender and sexual norms.5 This essay argues that the civic space that the “M community” is trying to carve out for itself constitutes a laboratory for the democratization of Haitian society. In its efforts to achieve social justice, the movement follows the communitarian spirit of both Haiti’s Vodou tradition and its revolutionary past, while opposing masculinist forms of centralized government, divisive social prejudices, and Western hegemonic discourses. Although the M community experiences a specific form of ostracization, its struggle for legitimacy reflects a much...

Representations About Discrimination Practices in the Education System Built by Gypsies (Ciganos) in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Portugal)

In Portugal, Gypsies (Ciganos) are categorized as ethnical and minority group, and they are particularly vulnerable to poverty and social exclusion. There is no doubt that they are one of the groups that rise more antipathy among the other Portuguese. In what concerns the “social images” built by the dominant society, there is a negative evaluation of the Gypsies and this image has persisted and resisted so far. Therefore, Gypsy identity and culture are considered marginal. However, the historical discrimination against Gypsies and the existence of a scarce interaction with the non-Gypsy society are some interesting results coming out from a qualitative study finished in 2006 about social representations and emotions that emerged in discriminatory contexts related with the educational system. One of the main objectives of this article is to find how Gypsies represent the school, the formal education, and the social agents that intervene in this educational context, like teachers, other school workers, and other students (non-Gypsies). It is possible to notice some discourses that revealed negative perceptions and rejection feelings incorporated by some Gypsies. They feel that they are treated like “inferior” persons and not recognized by the whole society.

Ethno-cultural diversity in home care work in Canada

Worldwide, immigrant workers are responsible for much of the care provided to elderly people who require assistance with personal care and with activities of daily living. This article examines the characteristics of immigrant home care workers, and the ways in which they differ from non-migrant care workers in Canada. It considers circumstances wherein the labor of care is framed by ethno-cultural diversity between client and worker, interactions that reflect the character of this ethno-cultural diversity, and the strategies employed by workers to address issues related to this diversity. Findings from a mixed methods study of 118 workers in the metropolitan area of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, indicate that while the discriminatory context surrounding migrant home care workers persists, issues of ethno-cultural diversity in relationships are complex, and can also involve non-foreign born workers.
 Multi-cultural home care is not always framed in a negative context, and there often are positive aspects.

Data mining for discrimination discovery

In the context of civil rights law, discrimination refers to unfair or unequal treatment of people based on membership to a category or a minority, without regard to individual merit. Discrimination in credit, mortgage, insurance, labor market, and education has been investigated by researchers in economics and human sciences. With the advent of automatic decision support systems, such as credit scoring systems, the ease of data collection opens several challenges to data analysts for the fight against discrimination. In this article, we introduce the problem of discovering discrimination through data mining in a dataset of historical decision records, taken by humans or by automatic systems. We formalize the processes of direct and indirect discrimination discovery by modelling protected-by-law groups and contexts where discrimination occurs in a classification rule based syntax. Basically, classification rules extracted from the dataset allow for unveiling contexts of unlawful discrimination, where the degree of burden over protected-by-law groups is formalized by an extension of the lift measure of a classification rule. In direct discrimination, the extracted rules can be directly mined in search of discriminatory contexts. In indirect discrimination, the mining process needs some background knowledge as a further input, for example, census data, that combined with the extracted rules might allow for unveiling contexts of discriminatory decisions. A strategy adopted for combining extracted classification rules with background knowledge is called an inference model. In this article, we propose two inference models and provide automatic procedures for their implementation. An empirical assessment of our results is provided on the German credit dataset and on the PKDD Discovery Challenge 1999 financial dataset.

REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT DISCRIMINATION PRACTICES IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM BUILT BY RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN IMMIGRANTS’ CHILDREN IN LISBON METROPOLITAN AREA

Based on a thorough qualitative study and interviews, this study presents a brief portrait of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants settled in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Portugal), with a particular focus on social representations and emotions that emerged in discriminatory contexts related with the educational system. Besides some initial difficulties and problems experienced by the immigrant's descendents, in general they actually have a successful insertion in the education system.

Two independent mechanisms of egg recognition in worker Formica fusca ants

Informational constraints can be an important limitation on the accuracy of recognition. One potential constraint is the use of recognition information from the same sources in multiple discriminatory contexts. Worker wood ants, Formica fusca, discriminate eggs based on their maternal sources of origin in two main contexts: recognition of eggs laid by nestmate versus non-nestmate queens and recognition of worker-laid versus queen-laid eggs. We manipulated the experience of F. fusca workers in laboratory colonies to both worker-laid and queen-laid eggs by transferring eggs between colonies in order to investigate whether these two contexts of egg discrimination are independent. Experience of non-nestmate queen-laid eggs significantly increased worker acceptance of both familiar (18% accepted) and unfamiliar (10%) queen-laid eggs compared to control workers without experience of eggs other than those laid by their own colony’s queen (2%). In contrast, worker acceptance of worker-laid eggs was not affected by variation in the egg experience of workers (14% in workers from control colonies exposed only to eggs from their own colony’s queen versus 19% and 17% in workers from colonies which had received eggs laid by either a non-nestmate queen or nestmate workers, respectively). Our results suggest that these two recognition contexts do not strongly constrain each other and are different in their ontogeny. In particular, worker-laid eggs are universally discriminated against by workers from colonies with a queen whatever the egg experience of the workers, while non-nestmate queen-laid eggs are strongly discriminated against only by workers without experience of eggs laid by more than one queen.