Human emotions are universal. But how freely people express them – and to whom – is shaped by culture, history, and lived experience. For African Americans, that shaping has a particular weight: centuries of racism and oppression have made emotional expression not just a personal matter, but a protective and sometimes strategic one. Understanding how Black Americans navigate this reality is not only a matter of psychological interest – it has real implications for mental health, education, and family life. This is the territory explored by Dr. Deon Brown and his colleagues at the University of Houston, Virginia Commonwealth University, American Jewish University, and Michigan State University. Read More
These researchers recently published studies – one examining African American college students, the other focusing on Black fathers of young children.
In one study, published in Affective Science, Brown’s team surveyed 169 African American college students across three universities: a predominantly White institution, a historically Black college, and a relatively racially diverse campus. They wanted to know whether students expressed emotion differently at home versus on campus, and what might explain those differences.
Four distinct patterns emerged. Some students were consistently low in emotional expression everywhere. Others were warm and expressive at home but notably closed off on campus. A third group of students expressed themselves freely across both settings. A fourth group showed relatively low levels of positive emotional expression at home, alongside higher levels of negative emotional expression on campus.
The type of university attended made no meaningful difference to which pattern students fell into. What did matter was their experience of racial discrimination on campus and the racial makeup of their friend group. Students who reported higher levels of discrimination were more likely to belong to the fourth group, characterised by lower family positive expression and higher campus negative expression – a pattern the researchers suggest may reflect a form of emotional adaptation to a hostile environment.
Meanwhile, students who reported more Black people in their friend group were more likely to belong to the second group – warm and expressive at home but not on campus – a pattern that researchers interpreted cautiously given the design of their study.
Black college students learn how to express emotions in different situations based on lessons in the home. The team’s next study explored how fathers influence Black youths’ emotional lives from an early age.
In the second study, published in the Journal of Black Psychology, Brown and his colleagues analysed interviews with low-income African American fathers of toddlers about their own emotions and their approach to teaching their children about feelings.
The fathers’ responses were thoughtful, engaged, and emotionally self-aware. Many described a complicated relationship with anger – downplaying it outwardly while describing its intensity vividly. With sadness, they were more open, often framing it as a natural part of life.
Most strikingly, their children were at the centre of almost everything they said, shaping how these fathers managed, expressed, and made sense of their own emotional lives. They also saw themselves as responsible for guiding their children’s emotional development, carefully choosing when to comfort, when to discipline, and when to model working through difficult feelings.
Together, these studies push back against flat portrayals of Black emotional life, and make a compelling case that to understand how people feel, you first need to understand the world they’re living in.
