Adultification, anger bias, and adults' different perceptions of Black and White children

Adultification, perceiving a child as older and more mature, and anger bias, perceiving anger where it does not exist, are two phenomena disproportionally imposed on Black children compared to White children. The current study assessed whether perceiving a Black child as older increases the odds of mistakenly perceiving anger. Participating were 152 parents who viewed video representations of 40 children in an emotion understanding paradigm. Black children were not seen as older than White children but they did have 1.27 higher odds of being misperceived as angry (p < .05). Additionally, for each year increase in perceived age, the odds of anger bias increased by 1.04 for the Black children (p < .05), but did not increase for White children. Implications of this finding include Black children receiving increased consequences when adults perceive them as older and angry.