Connecting to Community: A Social Identity Approach to Neighborhood Mental Health

ACADEMIC ABSTRACT

Integrative theorizing is needed to advance our understanding of the relationship between where a person lives and their mental health. To this end, we introduce a social identity model that provides an integrated explanation of the ways in which social-psychological processes mediate and moderate the links between neighborhood and mental health. In developing this model, we first review existing models that are derived primarily from a resource-availability perspective informed by research in social epidemiology, health geography, and urban sociology. Building on these, the social identity model implicates neighborhood identification in four key pathways between residents' local environment and their mental health. We review a wealth of recent research that supports this model and which speaks to its capacity to integrate and extend insights from established models. We also explore the implications of the social identity approach for policy and intervention.

PUBLIC ABSTRACT

We need to understand the connection between where people live and their mental health better than we do. This article helps us do this by presenting an integrated model of the way that social and psychological factors affect the relationship between someone's neighborhood and their mental health. This model builds on insights from social epidemiology, health geography, and urban sociology. Its distinct and novel contribution is to point to the importance of four pathways through which neighborhood identification shapes residents' mental health. A large body of recent research supports this model and highlights its potential to integrate and expand upon existing theories. We also discuss how our model can inform policies and interventions that seek to improve mental health outcomes in communities.

Space-focused stereotypes of immigrant neighbourhoods

Recent research suggests that stereotypes are not only applied to social groups but also to the physical spaces that social groups inhabit. We present three experiments investigating space-focused stereotype content and valence regarding immigrant and non-immigrant neighbourhoods. In Study 1a (N = 198), a pre-registered online experiment, we observed that participants associate more negative characteristics with immigrant neighbourhoods than with middle-class neighbourhoods. Whereas they imagined immigrant neighbourhoods as crime-ridden, dirty and dangerous, they imagined middle-class neighbourhoods to be quiet, clean and safe. Furthermore, whereas stereotype valence regarding immigrant neighbourhoods was negative, stereotype valence regarding middle-class neighbourhoods was positive, suggesting large effects. These results were replicated in Study 1b (N = 274), examining stereotypes of immigrant versus majority-German neighbourhoods. In Study 2 (N = 209), a pre-registered online experiment, we observed that space-focused stereotypes were more negative when cultural stereotypes rather than personal beliefs were assessed. Exploratory analyses revealed that, compared with majority-German neighbourhoods, participants imagined immigrant neighbourhoods to be lower in socioeconomic status and also reported feeling less psychologically connected to these neighbourhoods, regardless of whether space-focused stereotypes were personally endorsed or not. Lastly, a mega-analysis across studies suggested that effects of stereotypes of immigrant in comparison to non-immigrant places were very large (ds = 1.70). Together, the present findings indicate that mere differences in descriptions of places with reference to their demographic composition are sufficient to elicit large differences in associated stereotype content and valence.

A systemic approach to the psychology of racial bias within individuals and society

Historically, the field of psychology has focused on racial biases at an individual level, considering the effects of various stimuli on individual racial attitudes and biases. This approach has provided valuable information, but not enough focus has been placed on the systemic nature of racial biases. In this Review, we examine the bidirectional relation between individual-level racial biases and broader societal systems through a systemic lens. We argue that systemic factors operating across levels - from the interpersonal to the cultural - contribute to the production and reinforcement of racial biases in children and adults. We consider the effects of five systemic factors on racial biases in the USA: power and privilege disparities, cultural narratives and values, segregated communities, shared stereotypes and nonverbal messages. We discuss evidence that these factors shape individual-level racial biases, and that individual-level biases shape systems and institutions to reproduce systemic racial biases and inequalities. We conclude with suggestions for interventions that could limit the effects of these influences and discuss future directions for the field.

Places that Feel Racist: How the Built Environment Re/Creates White Racial Spaces and Time

In this 2022 Janet E. Helms Award for Mentoring and Scholarship keynote, I discuss the importance of understanding how our built-environment and our physical spaces and structures are intertwined with my conceptualization of systemic racism. I describe the problems with how we study racism, systemic racism, and context, and the limitations of how we have adapted traditional psychotherapy theories. In this paper, I propose an examination of structural racism and the ways in which white spaces, white property, and white time work to displace, dispossess, and dislocate black and other non-black people of color. This constant racism within white spaces allows us to understand what may be creating the psychological and physiological stresses many people of color experience. In better understanding systemic racism, I hope we can focus our critical scholarship on centralizing the humanity of black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other people of color.

"They're Everywhere!": Symbolically Threatening Groups Seem More Pervasive Than Nonthreatening Groups

The meaning of places is socially constructed, often informed by the groups that seem pervasive there. For instance, the University of Pennsylvania is sometimes called "Jew-niversity of Pennsylvania," and the city of Decatur, Georgia, is disparagingly nicknamed "Dyke-atur," connoting the respective pervasiveness of Jewish students and gay residents. Because these pervasiveness perceptions meaningfully impact how people navigate the social world, it is critical to understand the factors that influence their formation. Across surveys, experiments, and archival data, six studies (N = 3,039 American adults) revealed the role of symbolic threat (i.e., perceived differences in values and worldviews). Specifically, holding constant important features of the group and context, we demonstrated that groups higher in symbolic threat are perceived as more populous in a place and more associated with that place than groups lower in symbolic threat. Ultimately, this work reveals that symbolic threat can both distort how people understand their surroundings and shape the meaning of places.

Space-Focused Stereotypes About People Living With HIV/AIDS and the Effects on Community-Approaching Willingness

Targeting people living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), this research examined the prevalence of space-focused stereotypes and their underlying mechanism on behavioral inclinations. Study 1 adopted the explicit nomination and implicit Go/No-Go association tests to explore the existence of space-focused stereotypes of people living with HIV/AIDS. The results demonstrated that space-focused stereotypes were only manifested explicitly with characteristics such as messy, dirty, and gloomy. Study 2 demonstrated a more negative evaluation and community-approaching willingness for communities that include people living with HIV/AIDS than those without HIV/AIDS. Additionally, space-focused stereotypes were found to have an indirect influence on community-approaching willingness; the influence was mediated by both emotional (threat perception) and cognitive factors (community evaluation). These results indicate the deviation of explicit and implicit space-focused stereotypes. More importantly, it revealed that space-focused stereotypes decreased community evaluation and influenced behavioral inclination. This research suggested the existence of space-focused stereotypes on another stigmatized social group. Characteristics of space (e.g., geographical segregation) might be the key to forming space-focused stereotypes.

How Microaggressions Reinforce and Perpetuate Systemic Racism in the United States

The consequences of racial microaggressions are most often discussed at an interpersonal level. In this article, we contend that microaggressions play an important role in maintaining systems of racial oppression beyond the interpersonal context. Specifically, we illustrate how microaggressions establish White superiority in the United States by othering people of color (e.g., treating people of color as if they are not true citizens) and communicating that they are inferior (e.g., environmental exclusions and attacks, treating people of color as second-class citizens). We also present evidence that microaggressions play a role in protecting and reinforcing systemic racism. By obscuring systemic racism (e.g., false color blindness, denial of individual racism) and promoting ideas that maintain existing systemic inequalities (e.g., the myth of meritocracy, reverse-racism hostility), microaggressions provide cover and support for established systems of oppression. Overall, we find considerable evidence-from both empirical studies and real-world examples-that microaggressions contribute to the maintenance of systems of racial oppression in the United States. We conclude with a discussion of how we might begin to challenge this cycle by increasing awareness of systemic racism and the microaggressions that aid in its perpetuation.

Race and Social Class as Intersecting Social Categories

Abstract. Race and social class are inherently confounded; however, much of the literature focuses on only one of these categories at a time during attitude assessment. Across three studies, we examined the influence of race and social class on implicit and explicit attitudes. Results indicated that participants had more positive attitudes toward high social class White and high social class Black people than low social class White and low social class Black people. Attitudes for high social class White versus high social class Black people and low social class White versus low social class Black people were more nuanced and attitude/measure dependent. Thus, this research highlights the intricacy of attitudes when considering intersectional categories.

Racialized Discourse in Seattle Rental Ad Texts

Racial discrimination has been a central driver of residential segregation for many decades, in the Seattle area as well as in the United States as a whole. In addition to redlining and restrictive housing covenants, housing advertisements included explicit racial language until 1968. Since then, housing patterns have remained racialized, despite overt forms of racial language and discrimination becoming less prevalent. In this paper, we use Structural Topic Models (STM) and qualitative analysis to investigate how contemporary rental listings from the Seattle-Tacoma Craigslist page differ in their description based on neighborhood racial composition. Results show that listings from White neighborhoods emphasize trust and connections to neighborhood history and culture, while listings from non-White neighborhoods offer more incentives and focus on transportation and development features, sundering these units from their surroundings. Without explicitly mentioning race, these listings display racialized neighborhood discourse that might impact neighborhood decision-making in ways that contribute to the perpetuation of housing segregation.