UCA Assistant Professor in Psychology and Counseling Mollie Price-Blackshear received her sixth publication on a research study aimed to influence the reduction of prejudice in today’s society.
Price-Blackshear’s work, “Trait mindfulness decouples the association between system justification and racial out-group attitudes” was published over the summer after final revisions and the anticipated acceptance for publication was made.
The research study focuses on race and social problems. Price-Blackshear said she combined two areas of research, system justification and mindfulness, that have not necessarily been looked at together before and explored whether or not mindfulness could potentially reduce prejudice.
“System justification involves the motivation to believe society is fair and equal for all groups. With this work we were interested in whether this motivation to report that racial groups in society are equal, related to white Americans’ attitudes toward Hispanics and African Americans,” Price-Blackshear said.
She said mindfulness is defined as open awareness and acceptance of present moments and experiences whereas some newer research within the last 20 years suggests mindfulness can reduce prejudice and is associated with improved attitudes toward different racial groups, religious groups, political groups and homeless individuals.
“We were interested in this work to try to explore if mindfulness would help reduce the relationship between system justification and negative racial attitudes.”
Price-Blackshear grew up in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where although she was taught not to judge and label others, she observed many altercations of prejudice toward other social groups and saw the harmful impact it had on certain individuals at a young age.
This is what inspired her to enter the field of psychology and influenced her overall research topics.
“Prejudice hurts all of us … prejudice is a complex issue and is common and pervasive in society, so trying to find ways to reduce prejudice is important,” Price-Blackshear said.
The publication had been in the works since Price-Blackshear’s first semester of graduate school in the fall of 2014 when she first designed the research studies to then conduct research for the next six years.
It was not until she started teaching at UCA in the fall of 2020 that the majority of the publication’s writing, revisions and final draft took place.
“We submitted it [a manuscript] for publication to a few different journals and with those initial journals it was not accepted for publication,” Price-Blackshear said. “But we did get a lot of helpful feedback to help us revise, improve and strengthen our manuscript.”
With the help of her colleague, Remina Varghese, Price-Blackshear found the journal called “Race and Social Problems” which was deemed fit for her line of work.
“This journal was a good fit as it has a multidisciplinary understanding of how race impacts many aspects of our lives,” she said. “We received an enthusiastic revise and resubmit from reviewers and it was ultimately accepted this summer.”
She said it is important to keep in mind that even if something is rejected, you can still learn and build from the experience which will only make results stronger in the end.