Teachers' Cognitive and Affective Racial Biases Impact Decisions in the Classroom

2026-04-22

School-based racial inequities between White and Black youth have been well-documented. Even after accounting for student and school demographics, Black youth receive harsher discipline and are placed in lower academic tracks, with cascading impact on youth achievement, social-emotional competencies, and mental health. Racial bias in teachers’ decision-making and interactions with students has been identified as one factor contributing to academic disparities between White and Black youth. To reduce these disparities and provide students with equity-based classroom practices, we specify six different types of racial bias that can impact teacher choices in their practices. For convenience, we organize these into cognitive and affective components and discuss how deeply intertwined these two components are with each other. By understanding how different forms of bias are specifically activated, pathways to disrupt educators’ racialized practices can be identified to create effective interventions and teacher education programs.

White Italian Parents’ Ethnic‐Racial Socialization and Young Children's Prosocial Behavior Toward Outgroup Peers

Social Development · 2026-02-09

ABSTRACT White parents adopt various ethnic‐racial socialization (ERS) approaches that shape children's understanding of race and ethnicity, sometimes fostering awareness of ethnic‐racial inequalities and encouraging positive attitudes toward individuals from diverse backgrounds, and sometimes perpetuating a dominating perspective of whiteness as an invisible, natural privilege that is assumed while “othering” non‐White racial and ethnic groups. Whereas a growing body of research has examined ERS among White parents in the United States, less is known about these dynamics in European contexts, where ethnic‐racial relationships are increasingly salient. To address this gap, we examined ERS among White Italian parents and its association with children's prosocial behavior toward outgroup peers. The study involved 296 White Italian parents and their preschool children, recruited from different regions of Italy. Parents completed an adapted Italian version of the White Racial Socialization Questionnaire (WRSQ), assessing three ERS approaches: Conscious, Discussion‐hesitant, and Evasive. Children's prosocial behavior was measured through parental reports and a sticker‐sharing task, in which children were asked to share resources with ingroup and outgroup peers. Factor analysis confirmed three dimensions in our adapted version of the WRSQ. Results from a path analysis, controlling for children's age, sex, and parent education, showed positive and significant associations between parents’ conscious ERS and their children's prosocial behavior toward outgroup peers, as reflected in both parental reports and the sticker‐sharing task. Conversely, parents’ evasive and discussion‐hesitant approaches were not significantly related to their children's prosocial behavior toward outgroup peers. No significant associations emerged between ERS approaches and prosocial behavior toward ingroup peers. Findings provide further evidence for the role of parental ERS in young children's interpersonal behavior, providing valuable insights for fostering inclusive social development in early childhood.

Classroom discipline experiences and Black youth student–teacher relationships and classroom engagement.

Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology · 2026-02-02

OBJECTIVES: Black youth experience discipline at substantially higher rates than White youth, both within and outside of the classroom, and especially for subjective reasons. These disciplinary experiences may cascade into further challenges for Black youth. We explore how Black students' experiences of classroom discipline for behaviors that teachers perceived as disruptive, disrespectful, or defiant relate to the students' classroom engagement and relationships with their teachers as well as how child gender might moderate the association. METHOD: = 38; 86% female) in four school districts and their 130 Black students (50% female) completed surveys at school. RESULTS: Accounting for students nested in classrooms, we applied multilevel modeling. Discipline for disruption and disrespect had little association with Black students' feelings about school. However, discipline for defiance was associated with less emotional and less behavioral classroom engagement and more conflict with teachers. CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the distinct impact of discipline for defiance on Black students' school experiences, underscoring the need for educators to critically examine how disciplinary practices shape engagement and teacher-student relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Developmental impacts of deprivation and threat on emotion recognition

UNC Libraries · 2026-05-02

Mothers' interoceptive knowledge predicts children's emotion regulation and social skills in middle childhood

UNC Libraries · 2026-04-09

Interoception, often defined as the perception of internal physiological changes, is implicated in many adult social affective processes, but its effects remain understudied in the context of parental socialization of children's emotions. We hypothesized that what parents know about the interoceptive concomitants of emotions, or interoceptive knowledge (e.g., “my heart races when excited”), may be especially relevant in emotion socialization and in supporting children's working models of emotions and the social world. We developed a measure of mothers' interoceptive knowledge about their own emotions and examined its relation to children's social affective outcomes relative to other socialization factors, including self‐reported parental behaviors, emotion beliefs, and knowledge of emotion‐relevant situations and non‐verbal expressions. To assess these, mothers ( N =  201) completed structured interviews and questionnaires. A few months later, third‐grade teachers rated children's social skills and emotion regulation observed in the classroom. Results indicated that mothers' interoceptive knowledge about their own emotions was associated with children's social affective skills (emotion regulation, social initiative, cooperation, self‐control), even after controlling for child gender and ethnicity, family income, maternal stress, and the above maternal socialization factors. Overall, findings suggest that mothers' interoceptive knowledge may provide an additional, unique pathway by which children acquire social affective competence.

Parents' beliefs about children's emotions, children's emotion understanding, and classroom adjustment in middle childhood

UNC Libraries · 2026-04-11

To explore how parental socialization of emotion may influence children's emotion understanding, which then guides children's interpretations of emotion‐related situations across contexts, we examined the pathways between socialization of emotion and children's adjustment in the classroom, with children's emotion understanding as an intervening variable. Specifically, children's emotion understanding was examined as a mediator of associations between mothers' beliefs about the value and danger of children's emotions and children's adjustment in the classroom within an SEM framework. Classroom adjustment was estimated as a latent variable and included social, emotional, and behavioral indices. Covariates included maternal education, and child gender and ethnicity. Participants were a diverse group of 201 third‐graders (116 African American, 81 European American, 4 Biracial; 48.8% female), their mothers, and teachers. Results revealed that emotion‐related beliefs (value and danger) had no direct influence on classroom adjustment. However, children whose mothers endorsed the belief that emotions are dangerous demonstrated less emotion understanding and were less well‐adjusted in the classroom. Mothers' belief that emotions are valuable was not independently associated with emotion understanding. Findings point to the important role of emotion understanding in children's development across contexts (family, classroom) and developmental domains (social, emotional, behavioral) during the middle childhood years.

Racialized Emotion Recognition Accuracy and Anger Bias of Children’s Faces

UNC Libraries · 2025-05-10

Research suggests that individuals are racially biased when judging the emotions of others (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002) and particularly regarding attributions about the emotion of anger (Halberstadt, Castro, Chu, Lozada, & Sims, 2018; Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). Systematic, balanced designs are rare, and are comprised of adults viewing adults. The present study expands the questions of racialized emotion recognition accuracy and anger bias to the world of children. Findings that adults demonstrate either less emotion accuracy and/or greater anger bias for Black versus White children could potentially explain some of the large racialized disciplinary discrepancies in schools. To test whether racialized emotion recognition accuracy and anger bias toward children exists, we asked 178 prospective teachers to complete an emotion recognition task comprised of 72 children's facial expressions depicting six emotions and divided equally by race (Black, White) and gender (female, male). We also assessed implicit bias via the child race Implicit Association Test and explicit bias via questionnaire. Multilevel modeling revealed nuanced racialized emotion recognition accuracy with a race by gender interaction, but clear racialized anger bias toward both Black boys and girls. Both Black boys and Black girls were falsely seen as angry more often than White boys and White girls. Higher levels of either implicit or explicit bias did not increase odds of Black children being victim to anger bias, but instead decreased odds that White children would be misperceived as angry. Implications for addressing preexisting biases in teacher preparation programs and by children and parents are discussed.

White Italian Parents’ Ethnic-Racial Socialization and Children’s Prosocial Behaviors Toward Migrant-Origin Peers

IRIS Research product catalog (Sapienza University of Rome) · 2025-01-01

Parents’ ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) plays a crucial role in shaping children’s attitudes toward individuals from diverse ethnic-racial backgrounds. For instance, a review of 43 studies reveals consistent associations between parents’ conscious ERS strategies with their children’s greater awareness of racial inequities and more favorable attitudes toward people from different ethnic-racial backgrounds. However, these studies focus on entrenched racism resolution in the US, with few to no studies addressing tensions surrounding current issues of migration and integration in European countries. To assess the issue of growing migration flows and an increasingly multicultural society, we examined parents’ ERS in Italy and potential associations with children’s prosocial behaviors toward peers from diverse ethnic-racial backgrounds. The study involved 312 White Italian parents (89.7% mothers; Mage = 39.02) and their children (48.1% girls; Mage = 51.94 months; range 31–75 months). Parents completed an adapted version of the White Racial Socialization Questionnaire (Hagan et al., 2023), which evaluates three ERS strategies: conscious, discussion-hesitant, and evasive approaches. Children’s prosocial behaviors toward migrant-origin peers were assessed using both parental reports and a sticker sharing task, in which children were asked to allocate resources to Italian native-born and migrant-origin peers. A structural equation model (SEM) was estimated to examine the associations between ERS strategies and children’s prosocial behaviors, controlling for children’s age and sex assigned at birth. Results indicated that a conscious ERS approach was significantly positively associated with children’s prosocial behaviors toward migrant-origin peers, as assessed through both parental reports and the sticker-sharing task. By incorporating both behavioral observations and parental evaluations, this study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the links between ERS and early prosocial development. These findings contribute to the growing body of research on ERS in European contexts and may have implications for fostering inclusive social development in early childhood.

Developmental impacts of deprivation and threat on emotion recognition

Neurotoxicology and Teratology · 2025-03-25 · 7 citations

Context Matters as Racialization Evolves: Exploring Bias in Preservice Teacher Responses to Children

UNC Libraries · 2025-03-28

This study explores preservice teacher attributions to children’s behaviors portrayed in specific emotion-laden school scenarios. Participants included 178 preservice teachers from three universities. The preservice teachers viewed video vignettes of Black and White child actors in six different school scenarios. Our team constructed two themes from the preservice teachers’ narratives about what they saw: (a) context matters (i.e., different scenarios activate different preservice teacher attributions), and (b) racialization evolves (i.e., preservice teachers make different attributions about Black and White boys engaged in the same behaviors). Findings underscore the importance of teacher education and professional development for novice teachers that address racial bias in attributions of student behaviors.