This Social, Economic, and Behavioral Minority Post-Doctoral Research and Training Fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Robert Sellers in the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan is an experimental laboratory study investigating how racial identity shapes the everyday experiences of AfricanAmerican college students. Specifically, two aspects of racial identity will be examined. The first is stable feelings of racial identity centrality which refers to the extent to which race is important to an overall identity. The second is dynamic feelings of racial salience which refers how feelings of racial identity fluctuates across situations in response to setting cues. The conceptualization and measurement of centrality and salience will be based on the Multidimensional Model of Racial identity (MMRI). The first objective is to examine the effect of situational cues on racial salience. The second objective is to examine the mental health consequences of racial salience. The third objective is to examine how racial centrality might influence these associations. From emails provided by the University, one hundred African American females will be recruited to complete a web-based survey assessing racial centrality. A few weeks later, participants will be asked to come to a research laboratory to be randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: low racial salience and high racial salience. This study contributes to the literature on a previously underrepresented group by addressing several limitations in the research on racial identity. Historically, racial identity has been conceptualized and measured as stable. More recently, researchers have begun to explore racial salience empirically. As such, racial salience, and its interaction with racial centrality, remains largely understudied. By assessing how racial identity salience changes across settings, a more comprehensive understanding of the role of racial identity in the everyday lives of African American students can be obtained. In addition, by examining both the stable and changing aspects of racial identity, this study investigates how racial centrality may serve as a lens through which the objective environment is experienced in psychologically different ways. Furthermore, whereas racial identity research has been dominated by correlational research, this study employs innovative experimental methods, allowing for control of environmental stimuli. Understanding how setting features trigger racial salience and the subsequent impact upon psychological well-being may be particularly important for African Americans in higher education settings.
