Analysis finds that discrimination directly and indirectly harms mental health

Until now, there have been several indications that discrimination has a negative impact on people’s mental health and well-being. In a meta-study, female researchers at the University of Mannheim have shown for the first time a clear negative impact of discrimination.

A systematic meta-study by Christine Emmer, Julia Dorn, and Professor Jutta Mata, professor of health psychology at the University of Mannheim, psychology bulletin. The results show that discrimination directly and indirectly impairs mental health.

Discrimination has the greatest impact on aspects such as anger and hostility, reactions that target others. The Current State of Research study includes his 73 experimental studies with over 12,000 participants.

“In the past, there have been individual studies showing that discrimination harms mental health and well-being. This meta-study brings together all the studies and shows this effect very clearly.” said lead author Emmer. Many experiments have confirmed the research results. Researchers can best estimate actual effects by analyzing a variety of experiments, including their strengths and weaknesses.

Surprisingly, the largest effects were observed not when participants were discriminated against in the laboratory, but when participants recalled real-life events or witnessed others being discriminated against. That was the case. It wasn’t the derogatory comments made by researchers in the lab that damaged their mental health, but rather their personal memories of the situation and their observations of other people’s experiences of discrimination. This shows that discrimination not only leaves a strong impression on people’s memories, but also on people’s well-being.

Discrimination is understood as the unfair treatment of people based on their actual or perceived membership in a social group. Sexism against women and racism against ethnic minorities seriously damaged their mental health. In contrast, discrimination against people who are rarely marginalized in everyday life and experienced primarily as unfair treatment in individual cases (e.g., by artificial practices in a laboratory) has a negative impact on mental health as measured by No possible impact. Examples of this include sexism against men and racism against privileged ethnic minorities.

Discrimination based on sexual orientation had the greatest direct negative impact on mental health. Mata says there is too little research to systematically analyze other forms of discrimination, such as religion or disability. “There’s still a lot of research to be done here.”