"Controlling Images" and Black Women's Mental Health Outcomes

Vanessa Anyanso (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Counseling Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts. She is currently a Psychology Intern at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and a Clinical Fellow in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School where she is completing her predoctoral clinical internship. Vanessa was the RIDGS’ Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow during the 2024-2025 academic year and was also a former National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She earned her BA in Psychology from Columbia University in 2017 and worked as a Clinical Research Coordinator at University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine before beginning her doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota. Above all, she is the proud daughter of Nigerian immigrants and was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in its suburbs.

Broadly, Vanessa’s research focuses on using qualitative and quantitative methods to study the psychological health and well-being of marginalized populations, particularly Black and multiply marginalized populations, with a focus on protective and risk factors as well as culturally-effective interventions. Throughout graduate school, most of her work has focused on the impact of the murder of George Floyd and the associated racial unrest in Minneapolis on the well-being of the students, faculty, and staff at University of Minnesota. She also worked as an interviewer and interventionist on a community-based sleep intervention study through the School of Public Health. 

She is now focused on her dissertation, a mixed-methods examination of the Strong Black Woman schema and its relationship with positive and negative mental health outcomes for Black women from different ethnic groups. The Strong Black Woman schema refers to the beliefs and cultural expectations of resilience, independence, strength, and caretaking that shape Black womanhood. This concept is one of many of “controlling images” of Black women (i.e., Jezebel, Sapphire, Mammy), which Patricia Hill Collins (2009) defines as images and/or stereotypes that have arisen and persisted throughout history to dehumanize Black women and justify the unfair treatment they experience due to their social location. 

While this concept has been discussed in other fields for decades, it only began being studied within a Psychology framework within the past 25 years. Vanessa noted a disconnect between the qualitative and quantitative research. In qualitative studies, Black women defined their understanding of a Strong Black Woman and discussed the ways they feel the Strong Black Woman schema both helps and hurts their mental health (Thomas et al., 2024; Woods-Giscombé, 2010; Nelson et al., 2016). Quantitative studies have primarily focused on establishing the link between the Strong Black Woman schema and negative psychological outcomes. Further, the majority of research on this schema has been done within Black American samples: people who are the descendants of enslaved people within the U.S. The prioritization of Black Americans in previous studies responds to the history of the schema having arisen out of a US-specific gendered-racial landscape. However, as first- and second-generation Black Caribbean and African immigrants now comprise just over one-fifth of the US Black population, it is important to explicitly study the Strong Black Woman schema (and other Black cultural ideals) within an ethnically diverse sample. Due to growing up in different sociocultural contexts and histories of colonialism, it’s possible that Black immigrants' understanding of and relation to the Strong Black Woman schema could differ from Black Americans and also have different relationships to psychological outcomes. 

Vanessa designed a mixed-methods study in order to examine the relationships between the Strong Black Woman schema and psychological outcomes, in addition to giving Black women a space to describe their understanding of and relationship with the Strong Black Woman schema and how they perceive it affects their well-being. Vanessa recruited for this study through university networks, online, and personal and professional networks. She was intentional about recruiting equal numbers of Black, Caribbean, and African women to counterbalance the underrepresentation of Black immigrants in psychological studies. The recruitment process often necessitated a foundation of relationship-building work. For instance, Vanessa partnered with an Igbo American cultural group, with whom she also designed and facilitated a mini-workshop on self-care for women.

Vanessa hopes that her work adds to the understanding of the complex relationship Black women of different ethnicities have with the Strong Black Woman schema and its influence on their well-being. She sees her dissertation as not only adding to psychological literature, but to larger bodies of interdisciplinary, Black Feminist scholarship.

Vanessa’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship year at the Center for RIDGS Studies allowed her to carefully construct and implement her dissertation study. 

With RIDGS, Vanessa hosted a coworking group, where others nearing the end of their graduate career could have a dedicated space to work and think through ideas together. Members introduced each other to concepts from their own disciplines which enriched their research and with which they may otherwise not have engaged with. Vanessa has just finished data collection and is preparing to analyze the data. She will present her research via a RIDGS presentation during the upcoming academic year.