Prospective teachers are more likely to perceive Black than White elementary and middle-school students as angry, even when they’re not, according to new research published in Emotion. The findings suggest that Black children face a racialized anger bias in school.
“We know a lot about emotion and emotion expression, and we wanted to use our skills toward a question that really mattered and specifically, mattered for social justice,” said study author Shevaun D. Neupert, a professor at North Carolina State University and director of The Daily Well Being in Adulthood Lab.
For the study, 178 prospective teachers from three training programs in the Southeast were shown 72 short video clips of child actors’ facial expressions, and were asked to identify the emotion being displayed. The video clips included both Black and White students and male and female students.
“We hired child actors to display six different emotions and we had professionals who could make all six facial expressions on demand to work with the children until they were able to do so,” Neupert explained. “Then we took short video clips and we made sure that each expression was showing the desired emotion and only that emotion.”
Those emotions included happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise or disgust.
Overall, the researchers found that teachers were more accurate at identifying the facial expressions of girls than boys. The teachers’ emotional evaluations also tended to be more accurate for White girls than Black girls, while being more accurate for Black boys than for White boys.
But the researchers also observed a bias against Black students when it came to anger. The participants were 1.16 times more likely to mistake a Black boy’s facial expressions for anger than a White boy’s. Participants were 1.74 times more likely to mistake a Black girl’s facial expression for anger than a White girl’s. Boys of both races were misperceived as angry more often than Black or White girls.
“Our study found — and this is something that many Black families already know — that Black children are sometimes perceived to be angry, even when they are not, and more so than White children. And this is true for Black girls as well as boys,” Neupert told PsyPost.
“It turns out that none of us are that good at knowing what other people are feeling. We think we are, but really we are not. And so in schools, at least in elementary schools and probably more so as children get older, Black children are being misperceived as angry more than White children.”
“We wanted to do this in a highly controlled setting so the results could be used to complement all the reports from Black families about this, and could be used to guide teachers and schools to implement more training and reflection of their role in perpetuating bias. We know that very few teachers intend to be biased, but it is in our air,” Neupert said.
The researchers also found that higher levels of racial bias did not increase the chances of Black children being misperceived as angry. Instead, higher levels of racial bias reduced the chances of White children being misperceived as angry.
“Essentially, we found that prospective teachers are more likely to view Black children as being angry, even when they’re not,” explained co-author Amy Halberstadt in a news release. “And the more biased prospective teachers were, the more likely those prospective teachers were to give white children the benefit of the doubt. In other words, if the teacher had higher levels of explicit or implicit racial bias, they were a bit more likely to give white kids a ‘free pass.'”
When it comes to what teachers and parents can do to offset this racialized anger bias, Neupert has a number of suggestions.
“Given the systemic nature of this thinking, the first step is awareness. It is not that teachers themselves are ‘racist’ but the culture is racist and we have to be constantly reflective and vigilant about how it affects our teaching and interpersonal relationships,” she told PsyPost.
But in the context of a busy classroom, teachers often have little time to be reflective. “For teachers, so much is going on in the classroom constantly, and with 25-30 students in a room, there is no time. And yet, somehow to catch oneself in the moment and think ‘Is this real or is it in my automatic assumptions?’ would be good. And if not in the moment, then later, to have a conversation with the child to query and get some feedback would be the next best thing,” Neupert said.
“Our findings suggest that Black families experiencing this problem may continue teaching children practical strategies for identifying their emotions to the teacher.”
“Black families experiencing this problem may also continue engaging critical inquiry strategies when attempting to advocate for their schoolchildren by asking questions like, “We have also noticed patterns of how our child acts in certain situations. Could you describe what happened with more details, so we can share the emotions that we think were involved?” Neupert added.
“Of course, such practical strategies may decrease inaccurate perceptions only when school personnel provide all Black children and family advocates the opportunity to name and explain their own emotional displays with equitable consequences.”
The study, “Racialized emotion recognition accuracy and anger bias of children’s faces“, was authored by Amy G. Halberstadt, Alison N. Cooke, Pamela W. Garner, Sherick A. Hughes, Dejah Oertwig and Shevaun D. Neupert.
