Psychiatric and affective predictors of negative racial attitudes.

• Negative racial attitudes have been identified as major contributors to discrimination and inequalities, resulting in substantial deleterious physical and mental-health outcomes. • The present study is the first investigation directly examining the links of affective and psychiatric indicators to negative racial attitudes. • Participants completed measures of explicit, covert, and implicit negative racial attitudes, along with measures psychotic-like experiences, mood symptoms, affective processing, social attitudes, and personality characteristics. • Our results identified difficulties identifying and describing feeling, use of suppression to regulate emotions, and perceptual abnormalities as novel predictors of negative racial attitudes. Negative Racial Attitudes (NRA) have been identified as major contributors to discrimination and inequalities. Previous studies of predictors of NRA have focused largely on socioeconomic, socialization, social attitudes, and personality characteristics. Yet, the potential links of psychiatric and affective indicators to NRA have received little scientific inquiry. Three-hundred-and-two participants completed measures of explicit, covert, and implicit NRA, along with indices of psychotic-like experiences (PLEs), mood symptoms, affective processing, social attitudes, and personality characteristics. Explicit and covert NRA were significantly correlated with difficulty identifying and describing feelings, use of suppression to regulate emotion, and the PLEs domains of perceptual abnormalities, bizarre experiences, and persecutory ideation, along with social attitudes and personality characteristics. Implicit NRA was not associated with any indicators. Next, employing hierarchical multiple linear regression analyses, the affective and psychiatric indicators accounted 5.2% and 10.4% of the explicit and covert NRA variance, respectively, controlling for previously identified predictors including demographics, social attitudes, and personality characteristics. Our results point to newly identified predictors of NRA including difficulties identifying and describing emotions, use of suppression to regulate emotions, as well as PLEs, specifically perceptual abnormalities. We discuss the implications of the findings to the development and adaptation of anti-racism interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]