Advancing the use of immersive virtual environments to study the effects of racism on eating behavior in an Asian American population
Project Funding
Level 3 - Inter-Institutional Partnerships for Diversifying Research (IPDR)
Project Description
In this proposed research, we will examine stress responses (both subjective negative affect and pupil dilation) resulting from ethnic-racial discrimination that alters food-related decision-making. We will also assess whether different cultural knowledge frameworks modulate Asian Americans’ responses to ethnic-racial discrimination and, in turn, their subsequent food decision-making patterns. Our proposed research uses an interdisciplinary and innovative multi-method combination of survey, experimental, psychophysiological, and immersive virtual reality (iVR) tools to examine emotions as the underlying mechanism linking effects of overt ethnic-racial discrimination and food-related decision-making among Asian Americans. The specific objective of our proposal is to identify the effect of cultural knowledge systems’ salience (i.e., Asian vs. American) on the subjective (i.e., self-reported negative affect) and objective (i.e., pupil dilation) stress responses evoked by ethnic-racial discrimination and subsequent food choices.