Jennifer Eberhardt, of Stanford University, has just completed what she calls “some of the most depressing work” of her career. Her research appears to show that many white Americans subconsciously associate black people with apes.

Male undergraduates - mostly white - were tested on how quickly they could identify hazy sketches of apes. But, before being shown the sketches, pictures of male faces were flashed in front of them for a fraction of a second. If the flashed faces were black, the students were subsequently able to identify the sketches as apes much more quickly. White or Asian faces, on the other hand, did not speed up response times.

Another study examined news reports published between 1979 and 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, focusing on Americans convicted of capital crimes. Black convicts were four times more likely than whites to be described as “barbaric”, a “beast”, “savage” and “wild”. More pertinently, the blacks were more likely to be executed. Yet another study found that, when presented with the scenario of a black suspect being beaten by the police, students primed with the words ape or gorilla were more likely to excuse that brutality. This bias did not appear for white suspects, leading researchers to infer that the animal terms “dehumanised” the black suspects.

In all, six studies, done in collaboration with colleagues at Pennsylvania State University and the University of California, Berkeley, appear this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Professor Eberhardt, who is black, concludes that subtle racism has replaced overt racism and there is still a “battle for blacks to be recognised as fully human”.

You could throw your hands up in despair. Or you could marvel, as I do, that America might soon elect a black President.

Do you suppress your anger, or let it all hang out? If, say, PC Plod accused you of a crime you hadn't committed, would you lose your temper or accompany him quietly to the station?

If you are prone to bottling it all up and you wed a fellow bottler, you could lose years off your life. So suggests Professor Ernest Harburg, of the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He registered 192 couples aged between 30 and 69 in 1971, asking them the policeman question and using their answers to rate each partner as an anger “expresser” or “suppresser”. He then followed them up for two decades.

In the 26 couples where the husband and wife were both anger suppressors, Harburg recorded 13 deaths. In the remaining 166 couples, there were a relatively low 41 deaths. The research is published in the Journal of Family Communication. One psychologist says that the findings “add weight to the growing evidence that poor emotional housecleaning has health consequences in marriages”. Let the glassware fly!

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