What Lies Beneath? Minority Group Members' Suspicion of Whites' Egalitarian Motivation Predicts Responses to Whites' Smiles.

Antiprejudice norms and attempts to conceal racial bias have made Whites' positive treatment of racial minorities attributionally ambiguous. Although some minorities believe Whites' positivity is genuine, others are suspicious of Whites' motives and believe their kindness is primarily motivated by desires to avoid appearing prejudiced. For those suspicious of Whites' motives, Whites' smiles may paradoxically function as threat cues.

Never let them see you cry: self-presentation as a moderator of the relationship between exclusion and self-esteem.

A debate exists concerning whether exclusion harms self-esteem. We hypothesized that social exclusion does harm self-esteem, but that this effect is evident only when self-presentational concerns to "appear fine" are minimal or people are unable to alter their report of self-esteem. In the first three studies, participants' explicit and implicit self-esteem were measured following an exclusion or comparison condition where self-presentational pressures were likely high.