Active bystandership by youth in the digital era: Microintervention strategies for responding to social media-based microaggressions and cyberbullying.

Microaggressions are intentional or unintentional slights, insults, invalidations, and offensive behaviors that communicate hostile or derogatory messages to minoritized populations. When microaggressions cross over to social media, they can be considered a form of cyberbullying, which occurs over digital devices and harms, threatens, undermines, or socially excludes others. Microaggressions and cyberbullying have adverse mental health outcomes for racial and cultural minority youth, and there is an urgent need for practical strategies youth can use online to interrupt and disarm negative and harmful social media content. We used a multimethod approach to critically appraise and adapt Sue et al.'s (2019) microinterventions framework for use on social media with youth bystanders. Our analysis found high compatibility between microinterventions and youth bystander research, supporting transferability to social media for use with youth. Relevant adaptations include incorporating strategies that promote cognitive appraisal, cognitive empathy, education via social media, and use of social media features for external support. Using a social media microaggression example for each of the four microinterventions, we provide concrete tactics and example social media posts that youth can use when they come across insulting or offensive commentary online. The resulting framework offers a promising set of theory and research-informed strategies ready for further testing and refinement. When validated and refined, these microinterventions could be used as stand-alone strategies and/or incorporated into existing cyberbullying prevention or media literacy programs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Stress and Resilience Town Hall: A systems response to support the health workforce during COVID-19 and beyond.

OBJECTIVE: The COVID-19 pandemic is a traumatic stressor resulting in anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and burnout among healthcare workers. We describe an intervention to support the health workforce and summarize results from its 40-week implementation in a large, tri-state health system during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHOD: We conducted 121 virtual and interactive Stress and Resilience Town Halls attended by 3555 healthcare workers. Town hall participants generated 1627 stressors and resilience strategies that we coded and analyzed using rigorous qualitative methods (Kappa = 0.85). RESULTS: We identify six types of stressors and eight types of resilience strategies reported by healthcare workers, how these changed over time, and how town halls were responsive to emerging health workforce needs. We show that town halls dedicated to groups working together yielded 84% higher mean attendance and more sharing of stressors and resilience strategies than those offered generally across the health system, and that specific stressors and strategies are reported consistently while others vary markedly over time. CONCLUSIONS: The virtual and interactive Stress and Resilience Town Hall is an accessible, scalable, and sustainable intervention to build mutual support, wellness, and resilience among healthcare workers and within hospitals and health systems responding to emerging crises, pandemics, and disasters.

Disarming racial microaggressions: Microintervention strategies for targets, White allies, and bystanders.

Given the immense harm inflicted on individuals and groups of color via prejudice and discrimination, it becomes imperative for our nation to begin the process of disrupting, dismantling, and disarming the constant onslaught of micro- and macroaggressions. For too long, acceptance, silence, passivity, and inaction have been the predominant, albeit ineffective, strategies for coping with microaggressions. Inaction does nothing but support and proliferate biased perpetrator behaviors which occur at individual, institutional and societal levels. This article introduces a new strategic framework developed for addressing microaggressions that moves beyond coping and survival to concrete action steps and dialogues that targets, allies, and bystanders can perform (microinterventions). A review of responses to racist acts, suggest that microaggression reactions/interventions may be primarily to (a) remain passive, retreat, or give up; (b) strike back or hurt the aggressor; (c) stop, diminish, deflect, or put an end to the harmful act; (d) educate the perpetrator; (e) validate and support the targets; (f) act as an ally; (g) seek social support; (h) enlist outside authority or institutional intervention; or (h) achieve any combination of these objectives. We organize these responses into four major strategic goals of microinterventions: (a) make the invisible visible, (b) disarm the microaggression, (c) educate the perpetrator, and (d) seek external reinforcement or support. The objectives and rationale for each goal are discussed, along with specific microintervention tactics to employ and examples of how they are executed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).