Category: Racial Issues

 The centuries-old "one-drop rule" assigning minority status to mixed-race individuals appears to live on in our modern-day perception and categorization of people like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and Halle Berry.

So say Harvard University psychologists, who've found that we still tend to see biracials not as equal members of both parent groups, but as belonging more to their minority parent group. Their research appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"Many commentators have argued that the election of Barack Obama, and the increasing number of mixed-race people more broadly, will lead to a fundamental change in American race relations," says lead author Arnold K. Ho, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Harvard. "Our work challenges the interpretation of our first biracial president, and the growing number of mixed-race people in general, as signaling a color-blind America."

In the U.S., the "one-drop rule" — also known as hypodescent — dates to a 1662 Virginia law on the treatment of mixed-race individuals. The legal notion of hypodescent has been upheld as recently as 1985, when a Louisiana court ruled that a woman with a black great-great-great-great-grandmother could not identify herself as "white" on her passport.

"One of the remarkable things about our research on hypodescent is what it tells us about the hierarchical nature of race relations in the United States," says co-author James Sidanius, professor of psychology and of African and African American studies at Harvard. "Hypodescent against blacks remains a relatively powerful force within American society."

Ho and Sidanius, along with co-authors Mahzarin R. Banaji at Harvard and Daniel T. Levin at Vanderbilt University, say their work reflects the cultural entrenchment of America's traditional racial hierarchy, which assigns the highest status to whites, followed by Asians, with Latinos and blacks at the bottom.

Ho and colleagues presented subjects with computer-generated images of black-white and Asian-white individuals, as well as family trees showing different biracial permutations. They also asked people to report directly whether they perceived biracials to be more minority or white. By using multiple approaches, their work examined both conscious and unconscious perceptions of biracial individuals, presenting the most extensive empirical evidence to date on how they are perceived.

The researchers found, for example, that one-quarter-Asian individuals are consistently considered more white than one-quarter-black individuals, despite the fact that African Americans and European Americans share a substantial degree of genetic heritage.

Using face-morphing technology that presented a series of faces ranging from 5 percent white to 95 percent white, they also found that individuals who were a 50-50 mix of two races, either black-white or Asian-white, were almost never identified by study participants as white. Furthermore, on average black-white biracials had to be 68 percent white before they were perceived as white; the comparable figure for Asian-white biracials was 63 percent.

"The United States is already a country of ethnic mixtures, but in the near future it will be even more so, and more so than any other country on earth," says Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard. "When we see in our data that our own minds are limited in the perception of those who are the products of two different ethnic groups, we recognize how far we have to go in order to have an objectively accurate and fair assessment of people. That's the challenge for modern minds."

The team found few differences in how whites and non-whites perceive biracial individuals, with both assigning them with equal frequency to lower-status groups. The researchers are conducting further studies to examine why Americans continue to associate biracials more with their minority parent group.

"The persistence of hypodescent serves to reinforce racial boundaries, rather than moving us toward a race-neutral society," Ho says.

The research was supported by the Harvard University Anderson Fund.

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Journal Reference:

1. Arnold K. Ho, Jim Sidanius, Daniel T. Levin, Mahzarin R. Banaji. Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010; DOI: 10.1037/a0021562

One-third of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth have attempted suicide in their lifetime — a prevalence comparable to urban, minority youth — but a majority do not experience mental illness, according to a report by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The study, published online and in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health, is the first to report the frequency of mental disorders in LGBT youth using the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). Previous studies have relied on questionnaire-type surveys which, the authors suggest, may overestimate mental disorders in certain groups.

The UIC researchers recruited 246 ethnically diverse 16- to 20-year-old LGBT youth in Chicago and conducted structured psychiatric interviews to assess major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide attempts, and conduct disorder.

While a third of participants did meet criteria for at least one of the mental health disorders, about 70 percent of LGBT youth did not meet criteria for any mental disorders.

"One of the most important findings from our work is that most of these youth are doing very well and are not experiencing mental health problems," said Dr. Brian Mustanski, assistant professor of psychiatry at UIC and lead author of the study.

Nearly 10 percent of study participants met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and about 15 percent met criteria for major depression. A third had made a suicide attempt at some point in their life, and about 6 percent had made a suicide attempt in the last year.

"The big question is, are these youth more likely to have mental disorders relative to other kids?," said Mustanski, a clinical psychologist and director of UIC's IMPACT Program. "And the answer to that is that it really depends on who you're comparing them to."

LGBT youths in the study had a higher prevalence of mental disorders than youths in national samples, but were similar to other samples of urban, racial and ethnic minority youths.

The researchers also looked at differences between sub-groups of LGBT youth to determine if bisexual youth tend to have more mental health problems than gay and lesbian youth, or if racial-minority youth experience more mental health problems than white youth.

Contrary to previous research that suggested that bisexual youth are more likely to have mental disorders than other groups, Mustanski found just the opposite. Bisexual youths had a lower prevalence of mental disorders compared with others in the study.

The study was supported by a grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Co-authors are Dr. Robert Garafalo of Children's Memorial Hospital and the Howard Brown Health Center and Erin Emerson of UIC.

IMPACT, a program of the Institute for Juvenile Research at UIC, conducts LGTB research to identify health issues, understand factors that put people at risk or protect them, and develop programs that advance the health of LGBT people and communities. For more information, visit a http://www.impactprogram.org]

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Journal Reference:

1. B. S. Mustanski, R. Garofalo, E. M. Emerson. Mental Health Disorders, Psychological Distress, and Suicidality in a Diverse Sample of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youths. American Journal of Public Health, 2010; 100 (12): 2426 DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2009.178319

Black, Asian, and Native American children are more likely than white and Hispanic children to die after being treated for neuroblastoma, according to new research on the pediatric cancer. The study, of more than 3,500 patients with the disease, is the largest ever to look at racial disparities in risk and survival for the most common solid cancer found in young children.

The study also found that black and Native American children are more likely to have the high-risk form of the disease and show signs of resistance to modern treatment. Those biological characteristics suggest that genetic factors contribute to the outcome disparities found for neuroblastoma.

"Disparities in outcome according to race do exist in neuroblastoma," said Susan Cohn, MD, professor of pediatrics at Comer Children's Hospital at the University of Chicago Medical Center and senior author of the study. "There are racial cohorts of patients who do more poorly than the white population."

The analysis, published online November 22 by the Journal of Clinical Oncology, uses data collected by the Children's Oncology Group (COG), a partnership of more than 200 clinical sites in North America. Because neuroblastoma is a rare cancer, with only 650 new cases each year in the United States, the large coalition was essential to follow enough patients to answer questions about race and ethnicity, Cohn said.

"This kind of study has largely been impeded by the very small numbers of patients that we see, and the small numbers of minorities within that subset," Cohn said. "Through the COG infrastructure, we are able to collect data on the vast majority of patients who are diagnosed with neuroblastoma in North America. It's a much richer data set."

A subject pool of 3,500 children diagnosed between 2001 and 2009 enabled a research group led by Cohn and Tara Henderson, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, to compare children of different races on neuroblastoma risk and survival. While 75 percent of white and Hispanic patients survived five years after diagnosis, only 67 percent of black patients, 63 percent of Asian patients, and 39 percent of Native American patients survived to that point.

Patients diagnosed with neuroblastoma are classified as having low-risk, intermediate-risk, or high-risk disease based on a number of clinical and biological factors. Black children in the study had a higher prevalence of high-risk disease (57 percent) compared to white children (44 percent). Black patients also more frequently displayed individual predictors of high-risk disease, such as older age at diagnosis, stage 4 disease, and unfavorable histology.

"By definition, if you are older and have advanced stage disease, you are at high risk for relapse and more difficult to cure," Cohn said. "The major reason why the black patients do worse is because there are more of them in this high-risk group."

Another disparity emerged when researchers looked at the timing of post-treatment events such as cancer relapse or progression. After two event-free years following diagnosis, black patients with high-risk disease were significantly more likely to suffer a "late-occurring" event than white patients. This observation suggests black patients are more likely to have residual cancer after therapy, Cohn said.

Follow-up studies are underway to look for genetic factors that may predispose black children to high-risk forms of neuroblastoma and chemotherapy resistance. To do so, Cohn's group will partner with the University of Chicago pharmacogenetics team of M. Eileen Dolan, PhD, professor of medicine and Nancy Cox, PhD, professor of medicine.

The team will look for gene variations associated with chemotherapy resistance and the development of clinically aggressive high-risk disease in black and white neuroblastoma patients. The team will work with genome-wide association data (GWAS) provided by John Maris, MD, professor of medicine at the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania, which identified predictors of high-risk neuroblastoma in a subject pool of white children.

"Our long term goal is to utilize this kind of information to develop individualized therapy," Cohn said. "For example, if you know that a particular patient has a genotype that is associated with resistance to a specific chemotherapeutic agent, you might either modify the dose or treat the patient with a different agent."

The study also offers a potentially unique example of a disparity due primarily to biological, rather than socioeconomic factors. In many adult cancer types, the survival gap between white and minority patients is often attributed to factors such as diminished access to health care, delayed diagnosis, and poorer quality treatment.

But in neuroblastoma, this is less likely to be an issue. Low-risk cancers rarely progress to a higher risk with time, Cohn said, making a delayed diagnosis less likely to affect outcome. Furthermore, treatment for high-risk neuroblastoma — including intravenous chemotherapy, stem cell transplant, and radiation — is largely administered in a hospital setting, removing the effect of compliance, such as missing oral doses of medications at home.

"In many cancers, disparities in outcome appear to be largely due to differences in socio-economic status and environment. For example, the lack of ability to be seen by a doctor in a timely manner and get appropriate care significantly impacts survival," Cohn said. "While multiple factors are also likely to contribute to the disparities we observed in children with neuroblastoma, genetic factors are likely to contribute to the increased prevalence of high-risk tumors in the black cohort, which is quite unique."

Funding for the research was provided by the National Cancer Institute, the Neuroblastoma Children's Cancer Society, the Children's Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation, Little Heroes Children's Cancer Research Fund, and the Elise Anderson Neuroblastoma Research Fund.

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Journal Reference:

1. Tara O. Henderson, Smita Bhatia, Navin Pinto, Wendy B. London, Patrick Mcgrady, Catherine Crotty, Can-Lan Sun, and Susan L. Cohn. Racial and ethnic disparities in risk and survival in children with neuroblastoma: a Children's Oncology Group (COG) study. Journal of Clinical Oncology, November 22, 2010 DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2010.29.6103

— Stop using racial profiling, says Professor William Press from the University of Texas at Austin. He claims that as well as being politically and ethically questionable, racial profiling does no better in helping law enforcement officials in their task of catching terrorists than standard uniform random sampling techniques.

This is the topic of a paper publishing in Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association.

Racial profiling rests on the idea that people from particular racial or ethnic groups are more likely to be involved in acts of terror than people from other groups. The theory then suggests that law enforcement officers should spend a greater proportion of their time scrutinising people from the 'high risk' group. One problem with this approach is that innocent people who also belong to the targeted group rapidly become offended, and some may even become radicalised as a result.

"Racial profiling is as indiscriminate as deciding that people named Patrick are more likely to drink and drive, and so everyone who is named Patrick should be stopped and breathalysed more frequently than people with other names," says Press. Although it may be the case that some people named Patrick do drink and drive, he points out that there are clear problems in this profiling strategy. First, many Patricks don't drink and drive and will be unfairly detained. Secondly, this sort of profiling can have the appearance of success because if you keep testing more people named Patrick than other people, you are almost bound to find more Patricks who have drunk alcohol than people with other names. This then leads you to think the problem is even worse than you first suspected, and so you further increase the targeting of Patricks.

In the Significance paper, Press, based in the departments of Computer Science and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin, takes a thorough mathematical and statistical view of the process that underlies racial profiling, and concludes that some forms of racial profiling may even result in a smaller chance of detaining a terrorist than carefully conducted standard sampling.

In a world threatened by terrorists from a small number of countries, it is tempting to think that racial profiling for security purposes, even if morally objectionable, might save lives. "But uniform sampling, without the use of profiling, is surprisingly good. It is robust against false assumptions, it is deterrent, it is easy to implement, it is about as effective as any real-life system can be — and it is devoid of moral and political hazard," says Press.

He believes that the choice between a strategy of profiling and one of uniform random sampling should not be viewed as difficult; uniform random sampling wins.

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Journal Reference:

1. William Press. To catch a terrorist: can ethnic profiling work?Significance, 2010; (in press) DOI: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2010.00452.x

African American and Native American teens who do well in school suffer from a higher "nerd penalty" than white, Asian, and Hispanic youth, according to a new analysis.

"The negative social consequences of getting good grades were particularly pronounced for black and Native American students in high-achieving schools with small proportions of students similar to themselves," said University of Michigan developmental psychologist Thomas Fuller-Rowell, the lead author of the study.

The analysis of a nationally representative sample of more than 13,000 U.S. adolescents from more than 100 schools across the nation was published in the current (November/December 2010) issue of the peer-reviewed journal Child Development. The study was funded primarily by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Fuller-Rowell and co-author Stacey Doan of Boston University controlled for differences in family and school socioeconomic status, family structure, school-level achievement, and school safety, type and size.

To assess social acceptance, they asked students in grades seven through 12 how strongly they agreed or disagreed that they felt socially accepted by other students; how often in the past week other students had been unfriendly to them; how often they felt that other students disliked them; and how often they felt lonely.

As an indicator of academic success, they used student grade-point averages, comparing the relationship of GPA and social acceptance over the course of a year.

They found considerable differences among ethnic groups in the social consequences of academic achievement. For whites, the link between GPA and social acceptance was strongly positive over time — the better their GPA, the more likely that students were to feel accepted, and the less likely to report feeling lonely, feeling that others had been unfriendly, or that others disliked them.

For black students and for Native Americans, the relationship between GPA and social acceptance was reversed: the higher their GPA, the lonelier they were likely to report feeling, and the more they were likely to report that others had been unfriendly or disliked them.

While Hispanics overall displayed a pattern similar to whites and Asians, the researchers found significant differences between students of Mexican descent and those of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Central and South American heritage.

The Mexican students showed patterns similar to blacks, particularly when they were a small proportion of the population in high-achieving schools.

"This analysis did not identify reasons for racial and ethnic differences in the relation between school achievement and a sense of social acceptance," said Fuller-Rowell. "But it does strongly suggest that racial dynamics within schools are having an important influence on students' lives and should not be ignored. In fact, these dynamics are likely to be an important mechanism behind racial/ethnic gaps in achievement."

The analysis found no differences in the relationship of GPA and social acceptance based on gender and immigration status.

Fuller-Rowell is a postdoctoral fellow in the Achievement Research Lab at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

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Journal Reference:

1. Thomas E. Fuller-Rowell, Stacey N. Doan. The Social Costs of Academic Success Across Ethnic Groups. Child Development, 2010; 81 (6): 1696 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01504.x

How well a person performs in a coalition is partly hereditary, according to a recent study. Researchers found that how successfully an individual operates in a group is as much down to having the right genetic make-up as it is to having common cultural ties with fellow group members.

After assessing nearly 1000 pairs of adult twins, researchers at the University of Edinburgh found that strong genetic influences have a major influence on how loyal a person feels to their social group.

It also has a significant impact on how flexibly they can adapt group membership.

Family ties were less influential. Instead factors outside the family such as ethnicity and religion seem to account for the environmental influences that determine how successfully a group will operate.

To assess the influence of genetics, scientists asked the twins a series of questions about how important it was for them that people with whom they are affiliated share their religion, ethnicity or race.

They found that identical twins — who share all their genes — gave very similar responses, whereas non-identical twins were much more likely to differ in their answers.

Interestingly, they found that being part of a strong religious group made subjects less likely to emphasize ethnic and racial influence when deciding with which coalitions they become involved, regardless of genetics.

Professor Timothy Bates, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, who led the research, said: "The success of a coalition reflects the genetic make-up of the group members as well as cultural factors such as and shared goals, beliefs, and traditions."

This research could be applied to investigate affiliation in areas such as work, sport and the military."

The study, which is the first to examine the impact of both genetics and environment on how people form groups, is published in Psychological Science journal.

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Journal Reference:

1. G. J. Lewis, T. C. Bates. Genetic Evidence for Multiple Biological Mechanisms Underlying In-Group Favoritism. Psychological Science, 2010; DOI: 10.1177/0956797610387439

 It may seem difficult to change stereotypical thinking. Perceptions can be very important in forming an individual's attitudes. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found that people conditioned to think in opposition to racial stereotypes are more receptive to people from minority groups starring in commercial advertising.

"This research shows that when people are trained to think in a non-stereotypical way, they will pay more attention to ads with black protégés," said Saleem Alhabash, a doctoral candidate in the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Alhabash conducted the research in the Psychological Research on Information and Media Effects (PRIME) Lab with Kevin Wise, a professor in the Missouri School of Journalism, and Mi Jahng, a doctoral candidate in the Missouri School of Journalism. The study used the "Stereotype Reduction Paradigm," previously studied by other social psychology researchers. Under the paradigm, 10 participants received stereotype affirmation training, while 10 received stereotype negation training. Participants were shown pictures of black and white people paired with stereotype-consistent and stereotype-violating attributes. In the stereotype affirmation condition, participants were instructed to note whenever the picture-attribute pair displayed a racial stereotype. Under negation, participants were instructed to note when they saw a picture-attribute pair inconsistent with common stereotypes.

Then, participants were shown a series of commercials with three advertisements featuring black actors and three advertisements featuring white actors. Researchers tracked various psychophysiological responses to viewing each commercial. Participants who had experienced stereotype negation training showed decreased heart rate, which is the physiological response indicating increased attention to advertising featuring black protégés while those in the stereotype-affirmation condition showed an increase in heart rate, showing decreased attention levels. Negation and attribution-conditioned participants showed little difference in physiological reaction to white advertising protégés, reflected in heart rate deceleration for both conditions.

The project was presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) and was one of 16 projects to win a student poster award.

"Over the years, SPR has been welcoming of our work on how the mind processes media, but this award brings a whole new level of acceptance and validation to the science of media," said Paul Bolls, co-director of the PRIME Lab. "This is a great achievement for the School of Journalism, as well as the field of media psychology research."

The MU team's work beat out 250 projects for the award and is one of a very small number of media psychology projects ever to win an award at the conference.

Race may not be as important as previously thought in determining who buddies up with whom, suggests a new UCLA-Harvard University study of American college students on the social networking site Facebook.

"Sociologists have long maintained that race is the strongest predictor of whether two Americans will socialize," said Andreas Wimmer, the study's lead author and a sociologist at UCLA. "But we've found that birds of a feather don't always flock together. Whom you get to know in your everyday life, where you live, and your country of origin or social class can provide stronger grounds for forging friendships than a shared racial background."

"We've been able to show that just because two people of the same racial background are hanging out together, it's not necessarily because they share the same racial background," said co-author Kevin Lewis, a Harvard graduate student in sociology.

In fact, the strongest attraction turned out to be plain, old-fashioned social pressure. For the average student, the tendency to reciprocate a friendly overture proved to be seven times stronger than the attraction of a shared racial background, the researchers found.

"We both were surprised by the strength of social pressure to return friendships," said Lewis. "If I befriend you, chances are that you're going to feel the need to balance things out and become my friend, and often even the friend of my friends."

The findings appear in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology, which is expected to publish online early next week.

Other mechanisms that proved stronger than same-race preference included having attended an elite prep school (twice as strong), hailing from a state with a particularly distinctive identity such as Illinois or Hawaii (up to two-and-a-half times stronger) and sharing an ethnic background (up to three times stronger).

Even such routine facts of college life as sharing a major or a dorm often proved at least as strong, if not stronger, than race in drawing together potential friends, the researchers found. Sharing a dorm room, for example, proved to be one of the strongest formulas for friendship formation, ranking only behind the norm of reciprocating friendship as a friendship-forging force.

When they hit on the idea of using Facebook to study social networks, Wimmer, Lewis and colleagues at Harvard were looking for a way to study a network of friendships as it developed. They set their sights on freshmen of the class of 2009 at an unidentified university with a high participation rate on the social networking site. In addition to being highly selective, the university attracts students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.

"Given the school's high admission standards, it was highly unlikely that these freshmen were going be enrolling with their high school buddies," Wimmer said. "Most of these relationships were developing from scratch."

The university's approach to housing also lent itself to a study of friendship forces beyond race. Freshmen of different racial backgrounds are assigned to share rooms at a higher frequency than would be expected under random conditions, suggesting an institutional commitment to racial diversity in housing.

Even though 97 percent of the class's 1,640 students set up Facebook profiles, Wimmer and Lewis decided not to focus on the social networking site's most basic indicator of a social connection — its "friend" feature, by which students send a request to others on the network to become friends.

"We were trying to go for a stronger measure of friendship than just clicking a link and connecting with someone over the Web," Lewis said.

So the researchers followed the 736 freshmen who posted photos of fellow classmate-friends and then took the additional step of "tagging" the photos with those classmates' names, a step that causes the photos to be displayed on the friends' Facebook profiles.

"Tagged photos are by-products of people who obviously spent time together in real-life social settings," Wimmer said. "They're an echo of a real interaction that students also want to have socially recognized. They're not like some online communication that only occurs over the Web."

Wimmer and Lewis scrupulously tracked the tagged photos as the freshmen posted them, at an average rate of 15 unique "picture friends" per student. Armed with housing information supplied by the university and personal details posted on profiles, the researchers then set out to statistically analyze dozens of characteristics shared by the freshmen who tagged each other.

While the research was approved by Facebook, the researchers did not receive special permission to bypass privacy settings and only used information that could be seen by other students at the same university. The researchers determined each study subject's race based on photos and last names. They gathered additional information on each student's ethnic background; tastes in movies, music, and books; their home state, major and housing; and the types of high schools they attended.

True to past research, the sociologists initially watched same-race friendships develop at a much higher rate than would be expected if the relationships had occurred randomly, based on the racial makeup of the freshman class. For instance, white co-eds befriended each other one-and-a-half times more frequently than would be expected under random conditions. For racial minorities, the numbers were much higher. Latino students befriended each other four-and-a-half times more frequently, and African American students befriended each other eight times more frequently.

But when the researchers dug deeper, race appeared to be less important than a number of other factors in forging friendships.

Much of what at first appeared to be same-race preference, for instance, ultimately proved to be preference for students of the same ethnic background, Wimmer and Lewis found. This was especially the case for Asian students, who befriended each other nearly three times more frequently than would be expected if relationships were formed on the basis of chance. But once the researchers started controlling for the attraction of shared ethnic backgrounds or countries of origin, the magnitude of racial preference was cut almost in half. The appeal of shared ethnicity was strongest for Vietnamese freshmen, who befriended each other at three times the rate that average students befriended each other on the basis of a shared racial background.

"This means that students are going into social settings and saying to themselves, 'Great, there's someone else who is Vietnamese,' not, 'There is someone else who is Asian,' " Wimmer said.

Once the researchers controlled for the social pressure to return friendships, the importance of racial similarity in friendship formation further receded. Accounting for the pressure to return friendships and to befriend friends of friends, same-race preference dropped by one-half for Latinos and a whopping two-thirds for African Americans.

"Two students with the same racial background can also become friends because they follow norms of how to make friends, not only because of racial preference," Wimmer said. "If only to avoid tensions in one's social circles, friendships are often returned and friends of friends tend to become friends among themselves."

Controlling for the types of high schools attended by the freshmen also produced telling results. Alumni of the nation's "select 16" college preparatory schools were twice as likely to form friendships as were freshmen who shared the same race, suggesting that the distinction between elite and non-elite families is a higher hurdle to friendship than race.

While the researchers insist that their findings cannot be interpreted to show that racism and racial discrimination isn't still a problem in America, they believe that past research might have exaggerated the role of race in social relationships, not the least because data on race is readily available in existing datasets while information on other background characteristics or on student activities is much harder to come by.

Their study exemplifies a new trend in social science research to mine data from social networking sites to study human behavior, including relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity and political engagement.

"Facebook data on college students allowed us to peer behind race categories to see what other commonalities might possibly be at work in drawing together potential friends," Wimmer said. "It's a natural experiment in mixing people from all over the country and seeing how they behave in this new environment."

— Asian-American youth are one of the fastest growing populations in the United States. Although Asian Americans begin smoking later in life, they are more likely to smoke regularly and at a higher rate than other ethnic or racial groups, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Now, a University of Missouri researcher is examining the unique differences in adolescent tobacco use among Asians and other groups to provide specific recommendations for prevention and treatment.

"Given the large number of addicted teenagers, tobacco control programs tailored to youth should be a high priority," said ManSoo Yu, an assistant professor in the College of Human Environmental Sciences. "Programs for teens are crucial because of the devastating health consequences of smoking. Moreover, the cost of smoking cessation programs for adults is more expensive than those for youth."

Prevention efforts are especially important, considering that Asian Americans who smoke regularly smoke more than people from any other racial or ethnic group. There is a 300 percent increase in smoking among Asian Americans ages 12-17 compared to those age 18 years and older.

In the study, Yu analyzed data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey to find underlying factors related to smoking patterns of Asian Americans. Yu found that youths who frequently were absent from school were more likely to smoke or engage in health-risk behaviors.

"School truancy is a strong predictor of all stages of smoking intensity: experimental, occasional and regular smoking," Yu said. "It is important that parents and teachers collaboratively manage absenteeism and identify students' reasons for missing school. Truancy is often a response to trouble at home or school. Programs that enhance commitment and accountability to academics can decrease youth vulnerability to risk behaviors."

Asian Americans who have parents and other family members that smoke are more likely to smoke. The findings also indicate that demonstrating refusal to smoke is related to non-smoking in teens.

"Asian teens prioritize group memberships as more important than individual self-interests," Yu said. "Increasing refusal assertiveness can help youth avoid smoking. Programs should focus on teaching refusal skills to all teens because peer smoking is a strong predictor of smoking, regardless of gender, race or ethnicity."

The research was published in a recent issue of Nicotine & Tobacco Research, a journal published by Oxford University. Yu, assistant professor in the MU School of Social Work and Public Health Program, led a team of researchers including Hyeouk Hahm, assistant professor at Boston University, and Michael Vaughn, assistant professor at Saint Louis University.

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Journal Reference:

1. M. Yu, H. C. Hahm, M. G. Vaughn. Intrapersonal and interpersonal determinants of smoking status among Asian American adolescents: Findings from a national sample. Nicotine & Tobacco Research, 2010; 12 (8): 801 DOI: 10.1093/ntr/ntq100

A new study from the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis looks at how much African Americans and whites favor or prefer their own racial group over the other, how much they identify with their own racial group, and how positively they feel about themselves.

The work, by Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology in the School of Science at IUPUI, looked at both consciously controllable sentiments and gut feelings about social stigma and found a significant difference in both groups between what people say they feel and their less controllable "gut feelings."

"The Importance of Implicit and Explicit Measures for Understanding Social Stigma" appears in the current (September 2010) issue of the Journal of Social Issues.

Many studies of stigma have been conducted since the end of World War II but until recently they have looked primarily at explicit (recently learned) attitudes and did not include implicit measures of deep seated feelings acquired earlier in life and not consciously accessible.

To explain the difference between explicit and implicit measures, Ashburn-Nardo uses an illustration from everyday life. "You may be asked how you feel and you respond, "I'm okay," yet your body is showing signs of distress (e.g., high blood pressure or fast pulse rate). You're not necessarily lying when you say 'I'm okay.' It's more likely that you just may not realize how stress is affecting you. Explicit measures are much like your 'I'm okay' response to how you are whereas implicit measures are like the blood pressure cuff or stethoscope findings. It's important that we don't rely exclusively on the asking and neglect the less easy to access information if we hope to increase our understanding of stigma and be in a position to help people."

In her study Ashburn-Nardo found that African Americans consciously reported that they favored their own race, identified with their own race and felt very good about themselves at a rate much higher than whites. However when tested on non-conscious feelings, that was not the case. African Americans favored their race less and less strongly identified with their own race than whites.

Both African Americans and whites had positive gut feelings about themselves.

"This study provides a greater understanding of how stigma affects people in ways in which they are unwilling or unable to report explicitly. For over half a century social psychologists have asked members of stigmatized groups how they feel about themselves and about the group to which they belong. But they have only been learning part of the story — the perceptions individuals realize they have, not the ones they may have internalized over a long period of time. That is, people might suffer more from experiences with prejudice than they are able to report via questionnaires," said Ashburn-Nardo.

The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the University of Kentucky supported this work.

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Journal Reference:

1. Leslie Ashburn-Nardo. The Importance of Implicit and Explicit Measures for Understanding Social Stigma. Journal of Social Issues, 2010; 66 (3): 508 DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2010.01659.x