Generating Redemption Narratives in Response to Discrimination: Implications for Emotional Outcomes, Collective Action, and Adaptive Coping
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Richeson, Jennifer
Abstract
Discrimination is a widespread phenomenon that can have significant consequences for individuals’ psychological and physical health. Specifically, discrimination can be characterized as a stressor that can result in deleterious emotional outcomes, including increased levels of anxiety, anger, and distress. Further, experiencing discrimination can trigger psychological and physiological processes that lead to negative physical health consequences. Individuals who chronically regularly experience discrimination group-based mistreatment—i.e., members of societally stigmatized groups—often engage in emotion regulation processes to manage the affective consequences of discrimination. In this dissertation, I examine whether the ways in which people manage their emotions in the face of discrimination can alter the affective and behavioral consequences associated with it. I present nine studies that address gaps in our current understanding of whether and which emotion regulation strategies can be recruited to disrupt individuals’ psychological distress when processing past discrimination experiences, and their impact on collective action intentions. In Chapter 2, (Duker, Green, et al., 2022), I investigate whether the affective benefits of reappraisal may extend to people reliving and processing past experiences of discrimination. Specifically, I examined whether using self-distanced reappraisal or positive reappraisal via generating redemption narratives when contending with sexism yields affective benefits, relative to engaging in self-immersion. While I found limited evidence to suggest that self-distanced reappraisal is useful in the context of discrimination, this work offered some initial evidence to suggest that positive reappraisal via generating redemption narratives effectively attenuates the negative emotional consequences of contending with sexism. In Chapter 3 (Duker et al., under review), I tested the efficacy of generating redemption narratives among people contending with past experiences of discrimination against a number of putatively adaptive strategies. Across five studies, results revealed that generating a redemption narrative about past experiences of discrimination led to greater positive affect, lower negative affect, lower feelings of outrage, and greater feelings of empowerment, relative to self-immersion. I also observed that redemption was more effective in repairing affect compared to a filler task, and sense-making, but not a positive mood induction. Mediation analyses additionally revealed that self-reported measures of reconstrual, generating insights, and a positive temporal comparison, mediated redemption’s palliative effects on well-being. In Chapter 4 (Duker et al., in prep), I investigated the effectiveness of generating redemption narratives in mitigating the negative emotional consequences of discrimination, without abating collective action intentions, following exposure to vicarious discrimination. I found that generating a redemption narrative about a past discrimination might be able to help individuals effectively process personal discrimination, but did not do so at the expense of collective action intentions following exposure to vicarious discrimination experience. Taken together, these findings suggest that generating redemption narratives is a reliable, adaptive emotion regulation strategy that can successfully buffer the negative affective consequences of contending with experiences of discrimination, without undermining collective action intentions. Given the clear, negative impacts that discrimination has on stigmatized individuals’ psychological and physical well-being, understanding whether and which emotion regulation strategies could be recruited to disrupt individuals’ psychological distress, while additionally promoting collective action and other forms of dismantling the structural and/or motivational roots of the discrimination, is of utmost importance.
Recommended Citation
Duker, Ajua, "Generating Redemption Narratives in Response to Discrimination: Implications for Emotional Outcomes, Collective Action, and Adaptive Coping" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 904.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/904
