On Monday, November 4, 2024, Dr. Hilary Bergsieker, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, presented her talk, “Validating Versus Reframing Lived Experiences of Racial Discrimination: Contrasting Preferred, Intended, and Received Social Support.” at the SP Colloquium Brownbag.
You can find more information about Dr. Bergsieker's work here and her abstract below:
Abstract:
Social support can help people of colour (POC) cope with racial discrimination. Yet when POC disclose their lived experiences of racism, even friends sometimes fail to provide support that meets disclosers’ psychological needs. Drawing on theories of shared reality and reappraisal, a series of experiments (N = 1940) compare two emotion-focused social support approaches: validation (conveying that recipients’ feelings or responses are appropriate) and reframing (seeking to reduce recipients’ distress by offering a more positive perspective). I first demonstrate that when disclosing a specific personal experience of racism to a friend, POC prefer validation to reframing, especially when coming from White (vs. same-race) support providers. In turn, White participants say they intend to provide less reframing and more validation in written responses to POC disclosing racial (vs. non-racial) negative experiences, yet a live interaction paradigm reveals significant divergence between Whites’ intended support and Blacks’ received support. A final study finds that (a) experiences of racism are indeed most often disclosed to same-race and White people and (b) imagining a reframing (vs. validating) response from a friend leads to feeling worse overall affect, less perceived responsiveness, less racial shared reality, and more rumination. Across all studies, the gap between validation and reframing for perceived support widens for experiences more strongly attributed to race, especially when disclosed to White friends. I conclude by highlighting current directions and implications for more supportive conversations about lived experiences of racism in scholarly, educational, professional, and therapeutic contexts.