Making friends outside your own ethnic group or race in academic settings can reduce stress, researchers at University of California at Berkeley have found.
Researchers there who paired White and Latino students prone to bias in an accelerated “friendship” process found that members of both groups benefitted from getting to know one another.
According to the study published in the November issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that as the paired “cross-group” students in the study got to know one another better, their cortisol levels dropped significantly. Cortical is a hormone triggered by stress and anxiety.
In another set of US Berkeley findings published in an earlier issue of the journal Psychological Science, Latinos at that school and African Americans at Columbia University in New York who were concerned about being the targets of discrimination reported feeling a greater sense of belonging and satisfaction on campus after making a friend of another race or ethnicity.
'Regardless of students' majority or minority status, the friendship helped,' said Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, a UC Berkeley psychologist and co-author of the study, whose research examined the relationship between the acceptance of minorities at White-majority campuses and students' sense of well-being at college.
