Relation of Racial Identity Attitudes to Self-Actualization and Affective States of Black Students Thomas A. Parham Southern Illinois University—Carbondale

Relation of Racial Identity Attitudes to Self-Actualization and Affective States of Black Students
Thomas A. Parham Southern Illinois University—Carbondale
Janet E. Helms University of Maryland
The relation between racial identity attitudes derived from Cross’s (1971) model of psychological nigrescence, or black self-actualization, and various af- fective states hypothesized to be relevant to the racial identification process were investigated through multiple regression analysis. Subjects were 166 black university students. Both prowhite-antiblack (preencounter) and problack-antiwhite (immersion) attitudes were associated with greater per- sonal distress as indicated by negative relations between these attitudes and mentally healthy self-actualizing tendencies and by positive relations to feel- ings of inferiority, anxiety, and hostility. Awakening black identity (encoun- ter attitudes) was positively related to self-actualization tendencies and nega- tively related to feelings of inferiority and anxiety. The possibility that cogni- tive and affective components of racial identity attitudes may evolve via dif- ferent models is explored. Implications for future research and recommenda- tions for delivery of psychological services to black populations are discussed.
Studies of how black people are affected by the counseling process have generally focused on counselor characteristics or per- ceptions of the counselor and the counseling relationship (see Atkinson, 1983, and Sattler, 1977, for detailed reviews of such studies). Missing has been sufficient consideration to culture-specific diagnostic issues such as how the condition of being black in a predomi- nantly white environment influences the personality development and psychological adjustment of black persons. In fact, most previous attempts to identify personality characteristics and symptoms of black clients either have been based on theories of white adjustment or have merely compared black people’s scores with whites’ scores on some standard personality inventories that have included few, if any, blacks in the standardization samples (Gynther, 1972; Snowden & Todman, 1982). The end result of such procedures, as Gardner (1971) and Smith (1977) have pointed out, is that blacks

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