How Does Latino Threat Narrative Affect Negative Emotions and Perceived Threat Towards Latino Immigrants? a Call for Stigma-Focused Interventions

Background and purpose: The United States, although a nation of immigrants, has experienced uneasiness about every immigration wave since the early 1800s. In the most recent recurrence, social stigma arising from anti-immigrant sentiment has led to marginalization and discrimination of Latino immigrants. This stigma emerged in part from what Leo Chavez (2013) called the Latino Threat Narrative (LTN), a depiction of Latino immigrants as being unwilling or incapable of integrating into the US society, and as invaders destroying the American status quo. When widely spread in media, this narrative can play an important role in shaping how individuals perceive Latino immigrants, which in turn can result in discrimination, microaggressions, and hate crimes towards Latino immigrants. Although the LTN prevalence has been documented, its potential impact is not well understood. In this study, we conducted an online experiment to examine the effect of the LTN in news media on individuals’ negative emotions and perceived threats towards Latino immigrants.

 

Method: Participants were 205 non-Latino adults (47% female; 53% male) recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk on-line platform. Among these participants, 78% self-identified as White/Caucasian, 9% as African American, 8% as Asian, and the rest self-identified as other racial groups. Participants were randomly assigned to a control condition and two experimental conditions. Articles selected from national online news entities were used as exposures. In the control group, participants (n = 66) read an immigration-related article without negative stereotyping Latino immigrants. In one experimental group, participants (n = 68) read an article that stigmatized Latino immigrants as illegals and their babies as economic threat. In the other group, participants (n = 70) read an article portraying Latino immigrants as lagging behind at assimilating to the US culture. After the exposures, we assessed their negative emotion intensity and perceived threat with Geneva Emotion Wheel 3.0 and Schweitzer’s perceived threat scale, respectively. ANCOVA was used to test for mean differences across control and experimental groups.

 

Results: Participants exposed to LTN news articles expressing economic threat (M(SD) = 3.13(.97)) and cultural threat (M(SD) = 2.07(.96)) reported significantly higher levels of negative emotion intensity than participants exposed to the non-LTN news article (M(SD) = 2.01(1.02)). Compared with participants exposed to the non-LTN news article, participants exposed to LTN news articles expressing economic threat and cultural threat had significantly higher levels of anger, hate, contempt, fear, disappointment, shame, and sadness. The belief about Latino immigrants posing a cultural threat was also significantly higher among participants exposed to LTN news articles expressing cultural threat (M(SD) = 3.63(.80)) compared to those exposed to the non-LTN news article (M(SD) = 3.31(.70)).

 

Implication: The LTN may function as a stimulus event that generates a sequence of negative emotions and perceived threat towards Latino immigrants. Our findings may shed light on understanding the stigmatization process, where media plays an important role in forming negative stereotypes. The revealed effects of the LTN suggest a fertile ground for stigma-focused interventions targeting at non-Latino population through bringing the awareness of how media affects emotions and perceptions.