Journal of Youth and Adolescence - 2023 Emerging Scholar Best Article Award
The editors of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence have named Xiangyu Tao as the 2023 recipient of its Emerging Scholar Best Article Award for her article entitled “Exposure to Social Media Racial Discrimination and Mental Health among Adolescents of Color”. Tao currently is an advanced doctoral student in the Applied Developmental Psychology program at Fordham University. Her research interests center around understanding developmental risk and resilience in response to racial, sexual, and gender discrimination across different ecological contexts among underrepresented youth, primarily focusing on online experiences. Her co-author was Celia B. Fisher, Fordham University. Professor Fisher is a leader in the study of health disparities among diverse racial and ethnic and sexual and gender minority populations. She directs the Human Development and Social Justice Lab, the Center for Ethics Education, and the NIDA funded HIV/Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Institute at Fordham.
Tao’s article presented what already has become widely recognized as a groundbreaking study examining how offline and online racial discrimination associates with mental health problems among adolescents of color. The study was particularly timely given how pandemic shelter-at-home policies and the reignited racial justice movement increased the use of social media among youth of color, potentially exposing them to social media racial discrimination. She assessed the relationships among social media use (hours, racial intergroup contact, and racial justice civic engagement), individual and vicarious social media discrimination (defined as personally directed versus observing discrimination directed at others), and mental health among 115 black, 112 East/Southeast Asian, 79 Indigenous, and 101 Latinx adolescents. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses indicated that hours of use and racial justice civic engagement were associated with increased social media racial discrimination, depressive symptoms, anxiety, alcohol use disorder, and drug use problems. The findings also revealed that individual social media racial discrimination fully mediated the relationship between racial justice civic publication and depressive and alcohol use disorder. Vicarious social media racial discrimination fully mediated the relationship between racial justice activity coordination with depressive symptoms, anxiety, and alcohol use disorder. SEM models indicated that exposure to individual and vicarious social media racial discrimination increased depressive symptoms and drug use problems among youth of color, further increasing their social media use frequency and racial justice civic activities. The authors concluded that their findings call for strategies to mitigate the effects of social media racial discrimination in ways that support adolescents’ racial justice, civic engagement and mental health.
The journal’s editors view receiving the award as a considerably distinctive accomplishment. The journal publishes well over 150 manuscripts per year and continuously has ranked among the top developmental journals focusing on the period of adolescence.
The Journal of Youth and Adolescence provides a single, high-level medium of communication for psychologists, psychiatrists, biologists, criminologists, educators, and professionals in many other allied disciplines who address the subject of youth and adolescence.
Read the winning article at “Exposure to Social Media Racial Discrimination and Mental Health among Adolescents of Color (this opens in a new tab)”.