Riana Elyse Anderson

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Michigan

Although many parents worry that their child will be the target of racial profiling, there is a dearth of literature on how parental worries about children facing racism are linked to racial socialization (RS) practices and youth internalizing symptoms. Additionally, it is unclear how RS content relative to competency may uniquely influence whether...

Mental health treatments currently available to address racial discrimination for 21 million youth of color are inadequate. Given the nascent but promising mechanisms found within behavioral health interventions via racial socialization, or the process through which children acquire knowledge about race, developing effective and scalable therapeuti...

To help their children survive and thrive in our unequal society, parents of color must engage in the process of ethnic–racial socialization (ERS) or teaching about race, ethnicity, and racism. Equally important to the provision of ERS messages are parents’ confidence, skills, and stress levels around delivering ERS (i.e., ERS competency). Currentl...

Objective: Black American adolescents are beleaguered with the most frequent and severe experiences of racial discrimination (RD) among their peers. To protect Black adolescents' mental health and developmental outcomes from the pernicious impact of discrimination, parents and other proximal adults and peers often utilize racial socialization (RS)...

Historically, research on racial socialization (RS) has centered on frequency, beliefs, and content of parent–child communications, with varied applications and implications across racial and ethnic subgroups. The Racial Socialization Competency Scale (RaSCS; Anderson et al., 2020) was developed to assess three dimensions of a novel construct, RS c...

Parents of color’s critical consciousness development (understanding of and actions to redress societal inequalities) is an important yet understudied area, especially relative to the burgeoning literature on youth’s critical consciousness development. As with youth of color, ethnic–racial identity, or the meaning and importance placed on one’s eth...

Promotion and tenure (P&T) is the process by which academic faculty are evaluated on the trajectory and impact of their scholarly career. Faculty are typically assessed on their grants, publications, teaching, and service. Ethnically minoritized faculty face disparities in P&T, perhaps due to the lack of standards for quantifying their efforts in t...

Youth of color continue to experience challenges in having, accessing, and utilizing quality mental health services, especially because of inequitable physical and mental health outcomes related to COVID-19. Although several strategies may be waged to improve therapeutic uptake and quality of services, recent research has shown that both parents an...

The narrative surrounding the impact racism has had on the well-being of Black youth has shifted across sociocultural and historical context. Early discourse around these topics were problem-saturated, focusing on deficits "within" Black youth. Over time, an important narrative shift occurred: greater attention was paid to the inherent assets of Bl...

Racial discrimination is related to mental health challenges for Black youth and parents. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of intrafamilial factors, including parent racial worries, depressive symptoms, and racial socialization competency, on internalizing symptoms for youth. A sample of 259 Black parents (Mage = 40.6) of children...

Objectives: Ethnic–racial identity (ERI) has important implications for individual psychosocial functioning as well as familial processes. For example, parents’ ERI can shape children’s developmental contexts through ethnic–racial socialization (ERS). Yet, existing research has tended to focus on the content or frequency of socialization messages t...

Social media platforms exacerbate trauma, and many users experience various forms of trauma unique to them (e.g., doxxing and swatting). Trauma is the psychological and physical response to experiencing a deeply disturbing event. Platforms' failures to address trauma threaten users' well-being globally, especially amongst minoritized groups. Platfo...

Diversity, equity, and inclusion sciences were invigorated by Plaut’s (2010) landmark publication “Diversity science: Why and how difference makes a difference.” As this field has expanded over the last decade, it is timely to reflect on its current state and future directions. The goal of this special issue is to bring together a collection of art...

Alongside developmentally normative stressors, youth of color also cope with racially specific stressors. In fact, a large body of research documents the high prevalence of racial stressors like discrimination among youth of color (e.g., Black and Latinx). Young people of color experience racial injustice across their varied contexts including thei...

In a sample of 500 self‐identified Black adolescents from across the United States, this study investigated the pathways between youth's experiences of parental racial socialization (RS) and their sociopolitical development. Findings from structural equation modelling reveal that RS messages and actions were positively associated with youth's aware...

Racial socialization is a dynamic process for youth of color, especially for Black adolescents. What is less known is how the provision of racial socialization practices and messages may differ for varying ethnic groups of Black adolescents and what sociodemographic factors contribute to this difference. As such, this cross-sectional study investig...

There are known disparities in the burden of illness and access/quality of care for African, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American (ALANA) patients diagnosed with depressive disorders, which may occur because of health inequities. Racial stress and trauma (RST), or the significant fear and distress that can be imparted from exposure to racism, is on...

Historically, psychological science has contributed to maintaining the hegemony of white normativity and a fallacious belief in objective science that speaks to one singular truth about race. Due to a widespread unfamiliarity with critical theories and research methods in the field, novel approaches to psychological scientific inquiry are warranted...

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has brought health and social disparities to the fore, and intensified bias and racism in the U.S. and globally. In the context of discriminatory rhetoric and anti-Asian sentiments voiced by prominent political figures, Asian Americans have been disproportionately targeted with injustice, scapegoating, an...

Racial-ethnic socialization is a process where parents pass beliefs and behaviors to their children, including critical reflections on race and racism. Currently, it is not well known across racial/ethnic groups in the U.S how parents’ socialization competency (confidence, skills, and stress surrounding the delivery of racial-ethnic socialization)...

Black youth overwhelmingly experience racial discrimination (RD). Racial socialization (RS), or racial communication between families, mitigates RD stress by expanding youth coping strategies. Although most Black parents currently discuss racial content with their children, less is known about this RS quality. The burgeoning construct of RS compete...

Racial socialization has been a mainstay within the psychological literature for the past four decades, touted primarily as a protective factor buffering the negative effects of racism. How effective this factor is in preventing behavioral and emotional trauma and promoting resilience for Black and Brown families remains to be studied. While the li...

The world as we knew it changed abruptly in 2020. Whether due to the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), or subsequent events, including the murder of George Floyd, the election of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris, or the US Capital Insurrection, racialized events became a focal point for families who found themselves gathering together much more f...

With the increased frequency of highly publicized racism in the United States, the engagement of racial socialization among Black emerging adults and their peers is critical for navigating their racial experiences and organizing for change as evident in social movements led by young adults (e.g., Black Lives Matter). However, little is known about...

For Black American youth and their families, the racial terror that claimed the life of George Floyd in May 2020 is nothing new, as stories of people who look just like them have been part and parcel of their lived experience in the United States. Beyond state-sanctioned murder, Black youth were also witnessing the disproportionate transmission, tr...

For Black parents, the racial socialization (RS) process represents a critical parenting practice. Although the field has historically focused on the content of parents' RS, it is also important to consider caregivers' perception of their competence to effectively teach their children to navigate their racialized world. The present study investigat...

Racial discrimination can lead to psychosocial problems for Black adolescents, including internalization (e.g., depression) and externalization (e.g., conduct problems). Black parents (N = 186; Mage = 42.9) of adolescents (ages 10–18) were assessed to investigate how parental worries and racial socialization competency (i.e., confidence, skills, an...

For decades, marginalized communities have been naming the harms of policing—and the systemic racism that undergirds it—for health and well-being. Only recently have policing practices and racism within policing gained more widespread attention in public health. Building on social justice and emancipatory traditions in health education, we argue th...

Given the heightened national attention to negative race-related issues and the subsequent community solution-oriented outcry (e.g., Black Lives Matter movement), it is crucial to address healing from racial discrimination for Black Americans. Clinical and community psychologists have responded by developing and implementing programs that focus on...

The mental health status of Black youth is a complex interplay of resilience in the face of risk. Basic and applied research on cultural considerations for Black youth and their families has proliferated over the past few decades – elucidating a number of protective and promotive factors. Nevertheless, there remains a very significant gap between w...

The dissemination of knowledge concerning psychological problems, practices, and perspectives is often within selective journals requiring a great deal of financial investment or psychological services, which has historically been saddled with cultural incompetence, medical abuse, and subsequent stigma from Black Americans. To combat the confines o...

Researchers have documented the negative associations between racial discrimination and alcohol use for young Black people, yet fewer researchers have examined these associations longitudinally and with racial identity as a protective factor. We use data from the Flint Adolescent Study (465 Black/African Americans) to investigate the relationship b...

Perceived racial discrimination (PRD) has been documented as a risk factor for worse psychological well-being among African Americans. Yet, most researchers have not examined how trajectories of PRD during emerging adulthood shape psychological well-being in adulthood. Moreover, less is known about whether demographic factors and components of raci...

African American youth are more likely than their peers from other racial and ethnic groups to experience interpersonal traumas and traumatic racist and discriminatory encounters. Unfortunately, evidence-based trauma treatments have been less effective among these youth likely due to these treatments not being culturally tailored to address both in...

Trauma is prevalent among children and adolescents, with youth of color generally reporting greater exposure compared to White youth. One factor that may account for this difference is racial stress, which can manifest into trauma symptoms. Although racial stress and trauma (RST) significantly impacts youth of color, most of the research to date ha...

Despite the proclamation of a “postracial” society, racism in the United States remains “alive and sick” (S. P. Harrell, 2000), negatively impacting the physical, psychological, and emotional well-being of Black Americans. Moreover, the complex impact of racism throughout the life span is inadequately understood. Coping with the insidiousness of ra...

Objectives: The present study investigated the reliability and validity of the Racial Socialization Competency Scale (RaSCS). As posited by the Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal and Socialization Theory (RECAST), the RaSCS consists of 3 factors representing 3 novel dimensions of racial socialization competency present in families (e.g., stress, ski...

Racial stress and trauma negatively impact the psychological and academic outcomes of Black youth. Riana Elyse Anderson, Farzana Saleem, and James Huguley encourage parents and teachers to explore racial experiences and resulting stress and trauma through racial socialization, or competent conversations and behaviors regarding race and racism, to r...

Background: Risk for suicide is growing among certain groups of Black Americans, yet the topic remains understudied. Discrimination appears to increase risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, but the evidence has been mixed for Black Americans. This study aimed to examine the association between major discriminatory events and suicidal thoughts...

This commentary provides an overview of resilience in the Black family. It also offers a reflection on important work in this issue assessing the historical and future-oriented conceptualization of Black families in the social welfare system. A research program spanning an investigation of low-income Black families to theoretical and intervention d...

For youth and adults of color, prolonged exposure to racial discrimination may result in debilitating psychological, behavioral, and health outcomes. Research has suggested that race-based traumatic stress can manifest from direct and vicarious discriminatory racial encounters (DREs) that impact individuals during and after an event. To help their...

Researchers have illustrated the deleterious psychological effects that racial discrimination has exerted on Black Americans. The resulting racial stress and trauma (RST) from experiences with discrimination has been linked to negative wellness outcomes and trajectories for Black youth and families. Racial socialization (RS)-defined as the verbal a...

Objectives: Despite the abundance of research aimed at quantifying the impact of racism on the mental and physical health of African Americans, results remain inconclusive largely because of challenges with operationalization, as well as conflation with the concept of racial discrimination, which may be more readily assessed. The purpose of the cur...

Black American youth are vulnerable to the consequences of repeated exposure to racial discrimination, particularly through hampered coping abilities and greater internalizing and externalizing problems. One way in which Black American parents have protected their children from these deleterious consequences is through racial socialization, or comm...

The goal of this article is to report initial feasibility and coping response data from a pilot study of a new five-session intervention (Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race [EMBRace]) for Black families utilizing racial socialization to address stress and trauma from racial encounters. Ten caregiver and youth dyads were enrolled and compl...

The Family Stress Model acknowledges forms of resilience in the face of hardship; however, few studies have emerged on the potentially positive role of familial relationships in the academic, psychological, and prosocial success of impoverished Black children. The current study evaluates how parent–child relationship conflict and financial stress a...

This study examined patterns of (a) observed racial socialization messages in dyadic discussions between 111 African American mothers and adolescents (Mage = 15.50) and (b) mothers' positive emotions displayed during the discussion. Mothers displayed more advocacy on behalf of their adolescents in response to discrimination by a White teacher than...

The changing historical and cultural landscape of families in the United States has largely impacted and been impacted by shifts in neighborhoods and communities. World War II brought about significant change for family life, neighborhood mobility, and community functioning. As a result, economic and subsequently psychosocial disparities became evi...

Given the empirical links between familial characteristics and children's academic performance, this study examined associations between stress, relationship quality, and young children's school readiness (i.e., academic, psychosocial, and socioemotional characteristics) for economically impoverished Black families (N = 127). Parents reported low l...