This is a hybrid event.

Priscilla Lui, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Washington

Psychological Effects of Racial Discrimination: Results from Virtual Reality Experimentation

Scientific advancement on how, under what conditions, and for whom racial discrimination causes psychological harm can accelerate the design of interventions that mitigate the negative effects of discrimination, and efforts that promote well-being among people of color. To make causal conclusions, experimental methods are helpful in accounting for extraneous variables and allowing researchers to standardize racial discrimination stimuli across participants in the lab. Virtual reality (VR) can help simulating real-life experiences and enhance ecological validity of lab-based experimental results. I will present results from participants of color who completed a lab-based experiment on racial discrimination, and also responded to follow-up surveys on their experiences with the study procedures. This talk will show whether racial discrimination experiences simulated in VR elicited psychological reactions (i.e., stress, negative emotions, alcohol use) in real-time. I will also address the degree to which individual differences in racial identity modified negative effects of racial discrimination, how racial discrimination across severity levels prompted individuals to respond in qualitatively distinctive manner, and if participants considered the use of VR and experimentation to be ethical in discrimination research.

This free lecture is part of the promotion review for Dr. Lui in the Department of Psychology.