race-based rejection sensitivity

n. Race-based rejection sensitivity (RS-race) is defined as a psychological process wherein a person anxiously expects, readily perceives, and intensely reacts to rejection on the basis of his or her race. This construct is one in a family of models emphasizing the notion that the anticipation of being stigmatized is an aversive, affectively charged experience.

When people are exposed to discrimination, mistreatment, or exclusion (i.e., rejection) on the basis of status characteristics such as race, they may develop anxious expectations that they may be similarly treated in the future. Discrimination does not have to be experienced personally in order for a person to expect similar treatment in the future. For instance, a person may develop anxious expectations of race-based rejection after having been unfairly targeted by police but may also develop such expectations from having seen other people of his/her race being treated in this way. When triggered, these anxious expectations place a person in a state of anticipatory threat, lowering the threshold, in turn, for perceiving the rejection. This state also prepares people to react intensely upon perceiving this outcome. Although first applied to race-based rejection, the process is applicable to other potentially stigmatized characteristics, such as gender, sexual orientation, or religion.

An important feature of the RS-race construct is its context specificity at two levels. On one level, the process is triggered only in situations that contain the potential for race-based rejection. As such, RS-race reflects the interaction between features of situations (potential for stigma) and persons (psychological processes). This distinguishes RS-race from broader constructs such as domain-general neuroticism. It also implies that even though a person may be concerned about being stigmatized, he or she can feel at ease given a safe, welcoming context. On another level, RS-race is context specific in that the triggers of the process for one group may not necessarily be the same as those of another. For instance, whereas RS-race may be triggered among African Americans at a roadblock where police are randomly pulling people over, this particular situation is less likely to trigger race-based rejection concerns among Asian Americans.

An RS-race Questionnaire designed specifically for African Americans assesses anxious expectations of race-based rejection across a number of situations relevant to this group. African Americans score higher overall on the measure than Asian Americans or Whites. Nevertheless, there is substantial withingroup variability among African Americans; this variability highlights the within-group diversity of experiences surrounding race – although some people anxiously expect rejection, others may more calmly expect acceptance. Individual differences in anxious expectations of race-based rejection have been linked to a higher frequency of perceiving racial discrimination and prejudice in a series of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. People who score high on the RS-race questionnaire report greater feelings of rejection and alienation after a negative race-related experience than those who score low in RS-race.

Research suggests that RS-race can play a formative role in the experience of people entering predominantly or historically White institutions. It does so by influencing the quality of the relationships people form with institutional representatives and peers as well as the sense of belonging that people feel in the institution. In a study of African American college students, for example, RS-race was related to the trust and obligation students felt toward the university, as well as the discomfort experienced in interacting with professors. Consistently with a literature showing that concerns about belonging can disrupt people's ability to focus on their goals, RS-race was also shown to predict academic achievement negatively. These findings strongly suggest the need for educational and other institutions with a history of marginalizing groups of people on the basis of characteristics such as race or sex to attend to ways to foster a sense of inclusion among all their members. – RM-D