Abstract
Adults’ judgments of children’s behaviors play a critical role in assessment and treatment of childhood psychopathology. Judgments of children’s psychiatric symptoms are likely influenced by racial biases, but little is known about the specific racial biases adults hold about children’s psychiatric symptoms, which could play a critical role in childhood mental health disparities. This study examined one form of such biases, racial stereotypes, to determine if White and Black adults hold implicit and explicit racial stereotypes about common childhood psychopathology symptoms, and if these stereotypes vary by child gender and disorder type. Participants included 82 self-identified Black men, 84 Black woman, 1 Black transgender individual, 1 Black genderfluid individual, 81 White men, and 85 White women. Analyses of implicit stereotypes revealed that White adults associated psychopathology symptoms more strongly with Black children than did Black adults (p < .001). All adults held stronger implicit racial stereotypes for oppositional defiant disorder, anxiety, and depression than for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (p < .001). For explicit stereotypes, White adults generally associated psychopathology symptoms more with Black children than did Black adults but effects varied across child gender and disorder type. As the first study to examine racial and gender stereotypes across common childhood psychopathology symptoms, these findings point to a need for further investigation of the presence and impact of racial biases in the mental healthcare system for Black youth and to identify interventions to mitigate the impacts of racial biases to inform racial equity in mental healthcare in the United States.
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Data Availability
Data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author.
Notes
This study refers to children and adults in the African diaspora as Black, acknowledging this broad group’s heterogeneity in their racialized experiences in the United States.
We acknowledge the limitations of using terms that refer to sex (“male” and “female”) in a question about gender identity in the demographic questionnaire.
It is important to consider the delicate balance between over-pathologizing normative child behavior and failing to recognize pertinent mental health needs, especially for children with marginalized identities. American Psychological Association’s (APA) multicultural guidelines highlight the importance of considering individual clients’ intersecting identities within their unique sociohistorical contexts in diagnostic and treatment decision-making (APA, 2017), and how an active awareness of these implicit and explicit stereotypes, around both race and gender, could contribute to more culturally-sensitive clinical practice.
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Kang, S., Thiem, K.C., Huff, N.R. et al. Black and White Adults’ Racial and Gender Stereotypes of Psychopathology Symptoms in Black and White Children. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-024-01189-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-024-01189-7