Gold Okafor is a PhD candidate in social and personality psychology at UC Berkeley. She investigates racial and gender disparities through emotion research. Her research questions include, “how does the race and gender of an emotional person influence the judgments of the emotional person?” For example, how is an angry Black woman judged differently from an angry White woman, and what are the downstream consequences? And how do we accurately measure mindfulness, an emotion regulation strategy, within Black Americans?
Okafor is Ford Predoctoral Fellow and a recipient of an American Psychological Foundation Scholarship. Her past papers include “Measuring Mindfulness in Black Americans: A Psychometric Validation of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire.” This interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, who was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at Social Science Matrix.
Listen to the interview below or on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Julia Sizek: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I’m your host, Julia Sizek. And today, we’re recording live at our on-campus recording partner, The Ethnic Studies Changemaker Studio. Today on the podcast, we have Gold Okafor, a PhD candidate in social and personality psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, a Ford predoctoral fellow, and a recipient of an American Psychological Foundation Scholarship. She investigates racial and gender disparities through emotion research. Her research has examined how people judge the emotions of others in relation to their race and gender, and the topic that we’re discussing today, how to measure mindfulness within Black Americans. Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Gold Okafor: Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.
Sizek: So let’s get started by just understanding what mindfulness is. As you know, mindfulness has become a buzzword and may not mean anything to many people anymore. So how would you define mindfulness, as a psychologist?
Okafor: Great question. So mindfulness, the practice originated from Buddhist traditions, and the mindfulness that I research and talk about in my paper is mindfulness that has been brought over to the Western world and very westernized. However, within that, there are five facets or factors within mindfulness.
So it’s observing, describing, as in, I describe things as I see them, acting with awareness, being non-judgmental, and non-reactive. And so all of those five components act together as mindfulness. And while I don’t focus mainly on, what is it, there’s a huge debate within psychology of, what exactly is it? Is it just five factors? Does observing even matter? But what I do in the paper that we are going to talk about is more say, OK, how do we measure it accurately? And how do we measure it within a population that has not had it validated in before?
Sizek: Yeah. So maybe let’s get started on just like how mindfulness is normally measured. How would you measure, if you are observing yourself, for example?
Okafor: By me, you mean me, or practitioners?
Sizek: As a practitioner— or like, a practitioner or as a psychologist, how would you evaluate if someone is successful at observing?
Okafor: Yeah. Great question. So success is definitely a relative term. I don’t think that people aim for, ooh. I’m successful at it, because people like to use the floss analogy with mindfulness. So it’s like, ooh, if you like, don’t floss one day. Does that mean that you’re horrible at flossing? And you’re never going to floss again?
And then similarly with mindfulness, like once you do and practice mindfulness and you like can be– there are days when you miss it, there are days when it works, and the days when your mind is just all over the place. But back to the main question of, how do we measure it in the first place, so psychologists tend to use this scale called the five-factor or facet mindfulness questionnaire.
In short form, it’s the FFMQ. And not only do psychologists use it, it’s used predominantly within clinicians and practitioners. So say you have a primary care physician, and they recommend that you do mindfulness. Before they do that, they can tend to be like, OK, how likely is this patient going to actually practice mindfulness?
And so sometimes, clinicians can give you the FFMQ to measure their mindfulness and see how that works. So that’s the most common scale.
And that’s the scale that’s in my paper, that I talk about. And to speak to how common it is, a lot of times nowadays, if you are proposing either a study or you’re applying for a grant, they sometimes literally ask you to use the– they are saying, no. You have to use this five-factor mindfulness questionnaire.
And that’s happened to me and my colleagues before, in our own research, which is so interesting because as we’re going to get into, it’s been validated many, many times, but with only predominantly White samples in the English version. And so just trying to figure out like, OK, does this work with groups like Black Americans, Latinx, Asian-Americans? And so while I focus on Black Americans, I’m highlighting like, hey, we don’t even know the answer to so many different groups, but that’s how we currently measure it.
Sizek: Yeah. So maybe jumping into the subject of your research, can you tell us a little bit about what validation means, and also why you specifically wanted to focus on Black Americans as a subject of validation for this FFMQ test?
Okafor: OK. Definitely, I can talk about both of those things. Validation, within the field of psychology, it means that a scale or a measure is accurately doing what it’s supposed to do. And there are multiple types of validation. There’s construct validity. That means, hey, this is actually related to the construct of mindfulness.
And so, for example, saying, OK, mindfulness has been shown to decrease depression levels. So the scores on this scale should, in theory, inversely relate to depression or anxiety. And they should be positively related to life satisfaction or well-being. Things like that. So that’s construct validity. But then it’s also like temporal validity or temporal reliability.
So it’s saying, hey, if I take this survey on Monday, and then I take it again in two months, how different are my scores going to be? Because I’m the same person. And so if this is a valid temporal, reliable scale, then my scores should be highly correlated. So that’s a huge part of validity.
Also there is internal validity. And so that means the internal reliability within the factors. So again, there’s five factors in the five-factor mindfulness questionnaire. And being able to say, I’m sure that the observed factor and then the awareness factor are actually measuring different things.
And there’s more you could talk about it. What’s the relationship between the factors? Are they orthogonal? Are they hierarchical? But being able to know that is really, really important. And then finally, there are a level of reliability tests when it comes to statistics. So being able to say, we did a confirmatory factor analysis, and the results from this have produced numbers that are deemed passable based off of whatever standards.
And so that was a long-winded part of how to validate it. And then I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, you asked, how do I validate it within Black– or why is it important to validate it with Black Americans? Great question. So mindfulness, as within the Western world, is becoming this really popular tool to address mental health ailments.
And it’s really popular. You have it within– you see employers at top tech industries saying, hey, employers or employees, if you’re stressed or you are going through something here, here’s a free app to do mindfulness. And with that, mindfulness is relatively very accessible compared to other mental health treatments. So think about medication or therapy or other things that can be more costly compared to mindfulness.
While it can be costly to practice mindfulness with retreats, certain apps, certain programs, it’s more or less more accessible to more people. And it’s very important to study mental health within Black Americans, because they are more likely to have higher levels of depression, anxiety, and rumination compared to White Americans, and lower levels of satisfaction with life and psychological well-being.
So all of those are very important predictors of even larger problems, like coronary and heart issues. And within that same realm, Black Americans tend to have higher diagnoses — or higher frequency of diagnoses — of issues that tend to be highly correlated with stress. So think of high blood pressure. Black Americans tend to have higher blood pressure than White Americans.
That being said, so we have this mindfulness that’s popular and now easily accessible. Think about YouTube videos. But we don’t really know, now that it’s easily accessible, our groups that are more stressed out than the majority or more stressed out than the— I don’t want to say majority, but the prioritized group within society, how are we able to assess their mindfulness?
How am I able to confidently go to a doctor and say, hey, I’m stressed? And how is this doctor able to confidently tell me as a Black woman, OK, I can confidently assess your mindfulness with this scale? And so that’s like a long answer. But why it’s really important, even if Black Americans do not have desperate rates or percentages of mental health or diseases related to mental health, it is so important to make sure that all of our scales are validated across different cultures.
One really interesting thing, in the five-factor mindfulness questionnaire, there is an item that says something along the lines of, I notice the wind blowing in my hair. And I read that, and I was like, whoa. I normally have my hair in an Afro, it’s not in Afro today. It’s extremely windy and rainy today, and I’m not feeling the wind in my hair. And so how am I— or what if I had braids, or what if I had another— like, locks? How am I experiencing this?
And so that’s just another level of validity that currently doesn’t apply to Black Americans or a lot of Black Americans in that sense. And so it’s just a matter of, like, having a level of importance of, hey, this scale needs to be generalizable and usable across cultures.
Sizek: Yeah. And so it sounds like when the scale was developed, there were maybe only one or two groups of people in mind when they were thinking about it. And Black Americans were not included in that sample, which is why it’s really important to understand the limits of the scale, including, for example, for hair or other questions that they might have, they could be culturally specific without the people who made it realizing that it was that way. So as you were looking at this questionnaire, what were the other components of the questionnaire that you were concerned about or thought maybe would be difficult to translate or move across different groups?
Okafor: I do want to say that the scale was originally validated within predominantly White samples. They did not report, and most of the validations, they don’t report the ethnicity, past the majority. So if it’s over 50% one ethnicity, they’re going to only report that, or not at all, which is problematic within itself. And so there could possibly have been 1 out of the 200 or so participants who were Black in the first validation. But still, it’s not representative.
And then when it comes to what made me say, hmm, is this going to be applicable to Black Americans? I’m going to focus on the observed factor. And so the observed factor is the ability to observe things both internally and externally. So internally meaning like, ooh. I’m hungry. And externally as in like, ooh, it’s hot. The observed factor actually has a history of a lot of psychologists saying, yo, this is a funky factor. Is it more so awareness? It’s weird that one factor is combining both internal and external constructs together. It’s funky.
But then beyond that, within Black Americans or people who tend to be– whose safety is often put on the line or their safety is often in the forefront of their mind due to systemic racism, due to how they are over-policed, due to the safety of the environment or neighborhood that they live in, the ability to walk down the street and notice the sun on your face or the wind in your hair, if you could, in the first place, is very in-line with your ability to even walk down the street and not worry about your safety.
And not to say that non-Black Americans or White Americans are not worried about their safety as they walk down the street. But there are more things that Black Americans have to have in their mind. They have to be like, OK. I’m walking down the street. I am a Black person. Is the person who is not a Black person walking across the street because they’re scared, which many studies have shown that to be the case?
There’s a police officer driving by. Do I focus more on making sure I just walk one foot in front of the other and not necessarily do anything that might be interpreted as dangerous or illegal or whatever for the officer to pull me over? There’s so many things that can be going through someone’s mind, particularly, if you are an underrepresented or marginalized member of a group. And so mindfulness within the Western world tends to not acknowledge that. And that’s particularly seen in the scale, as well.
Sizek: Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re asking someone to evaluate external factors that are totally unrelated to other parts of their experience that might be more important, then how do they fare on the scale? So maybe let’s transition to that. In the work on validation that you were doing, how did you find that this FFMQ applied as a measure of mindfulness for Black Americans?
Okafor: OK. So spoiler alert, it was indeed valid. And we didn’t just do the full 49-item FFMQ scale, we also did the short version. Because not everyone has time to give their patients or their participants a 49-item scale. We also validated it within 15 items. And so we did this across a large sample of Black Americans that were diverse across the representation of income, skin tone, and ethnic heritage.
And it did validate. That means that this scale does measure what it says it’s supposed to measure within Black Americans. That being said, what my study doesn’t speak to is whether or not this is the most accurate way to measure mindfulness within Black Americans. It’s just saying that it’s valid, and a practitioner can confidently give this scale to Black Americans, and it will validly measure the mindfulness that is also being measured within a White American.
So yes. So yeah. To answer your question, it’s valid, but that doesn’t mean that future work shouldn’t dive into, OK, now how do we make a scale that is very particular to the needs of a Black American culture? So the relationship between mindfulness and its misconception or misrepresentation within religion, and how Black Americans have a high tendency, a higher tendency than White Americans, to be religious. And so how is that being played within a Black American’s practice of mindfulness? So that’s not answered in the study. But for now, what we can confidently say is that it does work to measure it, and then Black Americans.
Sizek: And that’s definitely a good thing to find, even though, I think, there’s probably a lot of room for improvement with this questionnaire and probably many other questionnaires that we use for things. So one of the things that you did in this study as well is that you were looking at in-group differences, which is, if Black Americans are understudied in psychology, then perhaps, in-group differences between Black Americans are maybe even less studied. So can you speak a little bit about what some of these in-group differences were and how you thought they might change the data or the different experiences that these people have within the one group of Black Americans?
Okafor: Yes. So my favorite part of the paper — and of the study — was what we did something called an “invariance analysis.” And invariance means, hey, people are going to answer this question whether or not they are part of one group or another. So, for example, if you have a math teacher, and they give you a test and the question is, OK, it’s— the football is on the 10-yard line, and they went up 2 yards off the first down, where is the football on the second yard line, or the second down?
And that used to be sometimes like a type of question that you can get from math teachers. However, that question might have a gender invariance, where boys are more likely to answer the question correctly than girls. And so, that right there is an invariance problem. And so to address that, you do an invariance analysis where you say, all right. Let’s look at how the boys respond. Let’s look at how the girls respond.
And if it’s different, statistically different, then we have a problem. And so in our study, within all of our Black American sample, we said, OK, let’s look at gender, let’s look at ethnic heritage. And so that’s people who are descendants of the enslaved, or people who recently migrated to America within– so, for example, saying they’re Nigerian or Caribbean.
And then we also looked at skin tone. So we looked at fair, medium, and dark skin tone shades of their face to see if, hey, is that a possible— are people of different skin tones interacting with stress and mindfulness differently in these patterns? We also did household income, which is important, because I said earlier, mindfulness can be marketed to people of higher class, or people who have access to employers who are comfortable paying for their mindfulness app, which is super interesting because this is actually the first study to even look at income. White, Black, never looked at income before, which is super-duper fascinating.
Finally, we looked at perceived discrimination, because Black Americans can perceive discrimination at different levels, right? So it’s very subjective to their own personal experience and their own personal definition, and you know, how they identify experience as discrimination.
All that to say, we did that invariance analysis. And I do have the code on my OSF link to the manuscript. So if people want to copy that code and do their own invariance analysis and future studies, I highly, highly recommend they do that. All that to say, the FFMQ was not invariance on all of those subgroups.
And again, my favorite part of the study, because it just really highlighted, hey, this is generalizable, this validation can be generalizable across Black Americans, regardless of income, gender, skin tone, et cetera. And that’s so important. And I hope that it’s like a platform for other studies to do the same.
Sizek: Yeah. So, I mean, do you have any ideas of how you want to apply this sort of in-group analysis to other studies that you’re looking at in the future?
Okafor: Yes. So I strongly believe that — as you mentioned, I study gender and racial bias through emotion research. And I say that I like to have principles in my research, and one of my key principles is intersectionality, and really being able to see like, OK, how are Black women treated differently or perceived differently than Black men, than Black — than White women and White men?
And so it sounds like a very simple question of like, well, duh. They’re different people. They’re different groups. They have different experiences. But psychology is a little, or a lot, late to the party. And they don’t have a lot of research that cares about gender and race intersectionally, right?
So they’ll say, OK, we’re going to compare men to women, but all of the stimuli would be White men and White women. Or they care, OK, let’s look at race. And they’re going to do White versus Black. But then all the stimuli would be Black men and White men. And that leaves out Black women.
So definitely in the near future, you will see a lot of work that — from me, that looks within-group analyses and intersectional identities and how we can really look at that within our samples.
Sizek: Yeah. So maybe this is a good time to transition to talk a little bit about some of your dissertation research, which also addresses this question, although in a very different way from sort of the mindfulness study. So in your dissertation research, you’re focusing more on how people perceive emotions of different folks. So can you just talk a little bit about your general, sort of, arc of the dissertation?
Okafor: Yes. So it’s dissertation, so it’s kind of long. And so we started off, and this was my first year of grad school. I started off being a little young PhD student and not knowing exactly what I wanted to research. And I remember seeing Serena Williams, and she was at a tennis match. And one thing happened over– And I forgot exactly what happened. But she was angry and smashed her tennis racquet on the ground.
And it received so much backlash. People were drawing her as if she was a monster. There was literally a cartoon from Australia of a cartoonist who drew her as this like, heavy-set monster, and then her opponent, Naomi Osaka, who’s also a Black woman, was literally drawn as a blonde-haired, White person in the background. And so it was just a really interesting thing, because when you think about it, sports are very emotion-driven.
You think about when Kobe is angry, that’s encouraged. That’s totally fine. But when you think about other White male tennis players who are notorious for breaking racquets and are notorious for being angry, they’re being judged different and perceived different. And so that made me start something that I call the “Serena Williams Project,” which is like a fun internal joke, where I question, how are people judging emotional expressers differently as a function of the expresser’s gender, race, and emotion?
And so to do that, I developed a paradigm where I had participants see an image that was a person who was either Black or White, male or female, expressing the emotions angry, neutral, or sad. And accompanied with this picture was a scenario that clearly explained why the person was angry, neutral, or sad.
And then after that, I said, OK, so how warm is this person? How competent is this person? How intelligent? Do you want to be this person’s friend? Do you want to work with this person? And with that, we found really interesting results. And so, the first time we did the study, we ran it around, I think it was like 600+ UC Berkeley undergraduate students. And we saw that the results were not what we thought. We saw that Black people, both Black men and Black women, were rated more warm and more competent than White targets.
And that’s odd. And we were like, whoa, what’s going on? And then we dug a little bit deeper, and we realized that when we compare the anger ratings to their neutral ratings, that’s where it gets super-duper interesting. So if I were to, out of nowhere, become angry at this moment, you would think I’m less warm. That’s a totally natural reaction.
And that’s how anger is theorized within psychology. Anger is supposed to signal a threat or action. And so when someone is expressing anger versus their neutral expression, they should be judged as less warm. And that’s the case for White men, White women, and Black women, but not for Black men.
Black men are judged equally as warm when they are angry than when they are neutral. And so that was really fascinating. So I’m in the process of digging deeper. I replicated it already. I added an element of cognitive load to see if the responses were automatic versus deliberative. And we get the exact same findings over and over and over again.
And I call it the “default emotional stereotype,” such that we have these emotional stereotypes of, for example, angry Black men or emotional women, overly emotional women, that are so ingrained within our society that when you see a neutral person of the stereotype’s target — so, for example, if you see a neutral black man — you are likely to judge them as if they were actually expressing anger.
And then vice-versa, when you see an angry Black man, you trivialize that anger as, well, that’s how they always are. Or a woman’s emotion is like, oh, that’s how they always– they’re just overly emotional. And then when they actually are emotional, or when they’re in pain, it’s being trivialized as like, oh, you’re not in that much pain, or things like that.
And so that is my dissertation research, and I’m so excited to continue diving deep in that, and being able to say, OK, like, this is why we have situations like Obama, who is known for being calm, cool, and collected, but during his presidency, a lot of his critics would identify him as angry, when he wasn’t.
And it can be important when we look at within hospitals, and how practitioners — circling it all back to health care — how practitioners prescribe pain medication differently by the gender of their patients, and then moreover, they prescribe pain medication way less to Black women versus White women.
And we see that in the mortality rates of people who are giving birth. The birth mortality rates. And Black women are more likely to die versus White women while giving birth. And so many studies have looked into like, OK, why? Is it income? No. Is it health-care literacy? No. And it kind of boils down to, it’s just their race.
And so long answer to a wonderful question, I’m super-duper excited to be looking at how we judge emotional people differently as a function of gender and race — and particularly, differently compared to their neutral expression.
Sizek: Yeah. So I mean, one of the interesting things that you raise in the work that you’re doing is how this could actually help explain some health disparities that we’re seeing elsewhere. And so how do you think this research, which I know isn’t done yet — how do you think it might be applied to help people better understand things like unconscious bias, and how it is affecting their patients or just affecting the way that they treat people in the world?
Okafor: Great question. So I will say, I don’t test unconscious bias, and I love that about my research. I actually test— I’m outright asking you, like, hey, essentially, are you biased? And so it’s very, very explicit bias. And it’s not— yeah. And so all that to say, when it comes to applying this research into the actual field, it really is saying, hey, first, we need to identify that there actually is a problem.
And so this is saying, this research is groundbreaking because it’s saying, hey, there’s a problem by gender and race together. As opposed to, previous work has always said, a problem by race by itself or a problem by gender by itself, and that’s not generalizable. So it’s the same generalizable problem that we get with the mindfulness skills.
And so when it comes to applying the work, this work can say, OK, we are able to measure it. And when you are able to measure it, you’re able to figure out, OK, what interventions can be applied to mitigate these effects? And so now that we have a way to measure and identify an issue, we can now say, ah! Now we can apply this intervention to decrease the gender and racial bias that can happen.
For example, there’s a paper in, I believe, 2019 by Jessica Salerno and colleagues, who looked at how juries view anger on a lawyer differently as a function of the lawyer being either a Black woman or a White woman. And super interesting, and again, this work is foundational to our understanding. And now that we have that, we can go, OK, we have a way to measure it. Now, how do we fix that? What intervention can be done to juries or to lawyers or to judges to decrease this disparity that we are seeing? So yeah. That’s a long-winded answer of, I am — we are still at the identification process, and that’s what I’m doing right now.
Sizek: So I think one of the things that you point out is that this is a research that psychology needs to be doing more. So what are some of the exciting directions that you’re seeing in psychology, where people are actually looking at intersectionality or looking at these in-group differences that you’re examining in your research?
Okafor: So yeah. I am super-duper excited for the amount of researchers who are pioneering a way of intersectionality research, culture psychology research. Here at Berkeley, we have [Sa-kiera Tiarra Jolynn Hudson], in the business school, who received her PhD in social psychology. And a lot of her work brings in intersectionality not just of gender and race, but also sexual orientation, things like that.
And then we also have so many researchers who are asking really important questions about intersectionality. That being said, psychology, and many other fields– [inaudible] — needs to incorporate other people or other groups’ period.
So there’s something called WEIRD populations or WEIRD samples. It’s an acronym for Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich, and– I’m forgetting what the D, I think the D probably stands for Developed. Yeah. Developed samples. And so that’s the tendency for psychology to use college samples. So it’s people who are predominantly White in that.
And so we still have a WEIRD problem within psychology. And, while it’s so important to be intersectional, it’s also so important to just have non-WEIRD samples. Like I have with the Black American sample. And I will say, it’s being more welcomed, and that’s super exciting.
My own advisor, Iris Mauss, who is just an amazing researcher, has wonderful knowledge on emotion research. And just her openness and willingness to work on intersectionality with me is a testament of how people are like, OK, yeah. This is the time to work on it, and this is the time to study it.
That being said, academia has a very WEIRD problem that loves to– yeah, loves to have their sample and loves to have their majority be White men. And it’s an uphill battle, for sure. But we’ve already started the battle. And I’m grateful to not be the one that started the battle. I’m just following the people who have been doing that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Sizek: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and telling us about your efforts to fight the battle to have better representation in psychology.
Okafor: Yay. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciated this. This is great.
Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
