Racial awareness, cognitive performance and affect

Racial awareness and early attitudes was assessed in 50 major-ity-group Spanish children in two age groups (36-48 months and 60-71 months). A series of tasks in a semi-structured interview was administered to test the children‟s: Cognitive performance (classification task), socio-cognitive measures...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Guerrero Moreno, Silvia, Enesco, Ileana, Lam, Virginia
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
Repositorio:RUIdeRA. Repositorio Institucional de la UCLM
OAI Identifier:oai:ruidera.uclm.es:10578/19653
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10578/19653
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Preschoolers
Racial awareness
Racial attitudes
Social cogni-tion
Educación Infantil
Conciencia racial
Actitudes raciales
Cognición social
Descripción
Sumario:Racial awareness and early attitudes was assessed in 50 major-ity-group Spanish children in two age groups (36-48 months and 60-71 months). A series of tasks in a semi-structured interview was administered to test the children‟s: Cognitive performance (classification task), socio-cognitive measures (racial awareness by person description, social catego-rization, and self-identification) and affective measures (preferences and rejections). Children were further asked to make attributions about their mothers‟ racial preference and rejection. Overall, children‟s responses in person description and social categorization revealed that gender and col-our of clothes had more salience in their perception than racial cues. In social affect tasks, children displayed a consistent in-group (White) bias, and a slight but noticeable out-group (Black) rejection. It was found that the cognitive performance measure predicted children‟s racial awareness and attitudes better than age did. The findings are compared to our fur-ther research, using the same procedure but in a multiracial context, and discussed in the light of theoretical approaches and the continuing socio-demographic transformations in Spain. Key words: Preschoolers; racial awareness;