Benjamin Saunders

Long Island University | LIU · Department of Psychology (Brooklyn)

Background: Emotion dysregulation and the internalization of sociocultural body image norms have been individually associated with eating pathology, but most studies utilized samples that were female, not ethnically diverse, or experiencing only diagnosable levels of eating pathology. Purpose: This study sought to better explain the relationship be...

Background: Empirical evidence suggests that individuals who have experienced the death of a parent early in life endorse interpersonal difficulties in adulthood. However, little is known about the underlying experiences that may lead to such distress. The current study examined whether individuals who experienced early parental death would endors...

The alarming frequency with which women face stranger harassment (i.e., catcalling) calls for further understanding of how they cope with it, and the present research sought to examine coping strategies within the context of system justification theory (Jost and Banaji 1994). We explored whether women’s strategies (Study 1) and men’s prescriptive s...

Stereotype threat research (Steele & Aronson, 1995) suggests that people often underperform on tasks when they face the prospect of confirming a negative group stereotype. The adverse effect of stereotype threat on performance, moreover, should be stronger for people who identify with the domain in which the stereotype is relevant. The notion that...

Until very recently, the New York City Police Department’s Stop, Question, and Frisk policy (i.e., Stop-&-Frisk) allowed NYPD officers to legally stop and detain New Yorkers under the suspicion that they may be involved in criminal activity. Previous research found that New Yorkers’ attitudes toward Stop-&-Frisk were generally mixed, and the curren...

The study examined whether successively presented subliminal and supraliminal morality salience primes ("double death" prime) would have a stronger influence on death thought accessibility than subliminal or supraliminal primes alone. A between subjects 2 (subliminal prime/ control) x 2 (supraliminal prime/ control) design was used. The supralimina...

Previous research suggests that Black Americans dislike same-race peers for "acting White," but the phenomena associated with acting White are not well-understood. This experiment tested the "acting White" hypothesis. Specifically, a general population sample of N = 154 Black young adults viewed one of four profiles that varied the race and interes...

There is clear evidence that the September 11,2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon had both immediate and long-term effects on the American psyche.1 Some of the psychological consequences of the attacks were transparently hostile, negative, and defensive. An unfortunate consequence of terrorist attacks against Western liberal democr...

This study explores the relative importance of everyday racism, empathic concern, communalism, and religiosity as predictors of pro-social involvement (i.e., volunteerism and membership in political/social justice organizations) among a sample of African American men ( N = 151). Church involvement emerged as a positive predictor of the likelihood t...