Browsing by Subject "Stereotypes (Social psychology)"
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Item Forewarning: a tool to disrupt stereotype threat effects(2004) Williams, Jeannetta Gwendolyn; McCarthy, Christopher J.; Aronson, Joshua MichaelThis study investigated forewarning as a preventive strategy against stereotype threat—a situation-evoked anxiety linked to minority underperformance on standardized tests. During evaluative tasks, concerns about possibly confirming a group-based negative stereotype may interfere with cognitive performance. The lack of an apparent stressor may lead an individual to attribute stress to personal inability. However, the true stressor is the negative stereotype aroused by the testing situation. This dissertation addressed whether forewarning participants about stereotype threat would ease or exacerbate threat effects on the cognitive performance of African Americans. In addition, this study examined the relationship between self-compassion and post-test anxiety and cognitive interference. Further, the relationships between self-compassion, social identity strength, and rejection sensitivity were explored. Prior to completing a challenging reading test under stereotype threatening or non-threatening test conditions, African American college students read a short text that described either stereotype threat or general test anxiety. The control group read a text unrelated to stereotypes, testing, or anxiety. The results revealed that participants forewarned about stereotype threat outperformed those forewarned about general test anxiety and the control group, when testing under stereotype threat conditions. Forewarning, either about stereotype threat or test anxiety, did not impair performance under non-threatening conditions. An interesting finding was that those forewarned about stereotype threat reported greater anxiety than the forewarned-test anxiety group and the control group. It was also found that self-compassion was negatively correlated with anxiety and cognitive interference and that the magnitude of these correlations was greater under threatening conditions than under non-threatening test conditions. Further, self-compassion was positively related to social identity strength and unrelated to race-based rejection sensitivity. The results suggest that foreknowledge helps African American college students to resist stereotype threat effects on cognitive performance. Further, it appears that self-compassion may prove beneficial in assuaging emotional and cognitive reactivity tied to stereotype threat. These findings point to the importance of identifying the mechanisms by which foreknowledge influences thought and behavior. Limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are discussed.Item Gender, values, and the formation of occupational goals(2006) Weisgram, Erica S.; Bigler, Rebecca S.Item Queers, monsters, drag queens, and whiteness: unruly femininities in women's staged performances(2004) Shoemaker, Deanna Beth; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., 1955-This dissertation investigates how women’s staged performances of “unruly femininities” potentially subvert normative understandings of gender and transform systems of representation. I define femininity as a complex, historically shifting, and heteronormative construct both reinforced and perpetuated by dominant discourses and resisted by different women in distinct ways. Thus, “unruly femininities” reflects critical re-stagings of femininity that ultimately break its internal “rules.” The performances examined here foreground a potentially scandalous use of the female voice and body to violate and/or parody heterosexual norms of femininity and masculinity. I focus on women’s self-representations within the public and often contentious realms of feminist theater and women’s performance. My field of study is limited to contemporary women’s performances on traditional theater stages, in popular music, and in the field of visual art in North America. Specifically, I analyze a production of Paula Vogel’s play Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief, Lois Weaver’s performances both within Split Britches’s show Belle Reprieve and in her solo show Faith and Dancing: Mapping Femininity and Other Natural Disasters, Jacqueline Lawton’s solo performance series “Venus Stands Sublimely Nude,” Patty Chang’s photographic sculptures, Deborah Vasquez’s comic strip character “Citlali La Chicana Superhero,” and Leslie Mah’s performance within the queercore allfemale band “Tribe 8.” Reading Elin Diamond’s theory of feminist mimesis in relationship to Brechtian feminist performances of female spectacle and white heterofemininity, queer female-to-femme drag, and stagings of melancholic abjection and “macha femme” menace by women of color, I consider how these performances variously disrupt, deconstruct and transform representations of gender in feminist ways. Differences across race, class, sexuality, and age significantly shape performers’ strategies and issues of audience reception. I argue that while women who use their bodies and voices as vehicles of public protest are often at risk of being “punished” in various ways, they also demonstrate the disruptive power of the unruly woman within systems of representation.Item Stereotype threat in mixed-sex dyadic communication(2009-05) Pfiester, Rebecca Abigail; McGlone, Matthew S., 1966-Stereotype threat is the cognitive pressure certain individuals feel when they believe their performance on a particular task might confirm a negative stereotype about their group. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the possible negative influence of stereotype threat on mixed-sex dyadic encounters by objectively and subjectively measuring their verbal accommodation behaviors. Sex-stereotypes were manipulated (men have greater logical intelligence than women; women have greater social intelligence than men) while participants engaged in multiple mixed-sex interactions. Four patterns emerged when analyzing the presence of both objective and subjective communication accommodation behaviors. First, women were more likely than men to objectively demonstrate accommodation behaviors such as hedges, questions, fillers, and back-channel responses. Second, most participants used less accommodation behaviors over time. Third, comparing the objective and subjective expressions of accommodation behaviors revealed no relationship--in other words, people may report one thing, but third-party accounts point toward different results. Finally, the way people judge a stranger's overall character is highly correlated to their perception of his/her verbal accommodation behaviors. This dissertation concludes with future recommendations for interpersonal communication scholars interested in stereotype threat research.Item Stereotype threat reinterpreted as a regulatory fit(2007-12) Grimm Narvaez, Lisa Renee, 1980-; Markman, Arthur B.Starting with Steele and Aronson (1995), research documents the performance decrements resulting from the activation of a negative task-relevant stereotype. I suggest that negative stereotypes can generate better performance, as they produce a prevention focus (Higgins, 2000; Seibt & Förster, 2004), because a prevention focus leads to greater cognitive flexibility in a task where points are lost (Maddox, Markman, & Baldwin, 2006). My prior work, Experiments 1 and 2, done in collaboration with Arthur B. Markman, W. Todd Maddox, and Grant C. Baldwin, used a category learning task that requires the participant test different explicit rules to correctly categorize stimuli. Half of the participants gained points for correct responses while half of the participants lost points for correct responses. We primed a positive or a negative gender stereotype. The negative prime matches the losses environment while the positive prime matches the gains environment. The match states are assumed to increase dopamine release into frontal brain areas leading to increased cognitive flexibility and better task performance whereas the mismatch states should not. Thus, we predict and obtain a 3-way interaction between Stereotype (Positive, Negative), Gender (Male, Female), and Reward structure (Gains, Losses) for accuracy and strategy. Experiments 3 and 4 used a category learning task, which requires the implicit learning system to govern participant responses. This task had an information-integration category structure and involves the striatum (e.g., Maddox & Ashby, 2004). Importantly, cognitive flexibility will hurt performance using this category structure. I therefore predicted that regulatory match states, created by manipulating Stereotype and Reward structure, will produce worse performance than mismatch states. I did not completely reverse the effects described in Experiments 1 and 2 as predicted. I found evidence supporting my predictions using computational models to test for task strategy in Experiment 3 and found results consistent with the flexibility hypothesis in Experiment 4. Importantly, I believe that stereotype threat effects should not be conceptualized as a main effect with negative stereotypes producing worse performance than positive stereotypes, but instead as an interaction between the motivational state of the individual, task environment, and type of task performed.Item What is beautiful is sex-typed: a developmental examination(2003) Hoss, Rebecca Anne; Langlois, Judith H.Stereotypes about attractiveness and gender seem to implicate each other in various ways. Previous research has found that adults rate highly attractive targets as being more sex-typed than less attractive targets. This phenomenon has been identified as the “beauty-is-sex-typed” stereotype and has been examined only in adults and with a limited number of sex-typed attributes. The studies reported here extend previous research and provide important developmental data by having adults (Experiment 1) and 7-9-year-old children (Experiment 2) rate more and less attractive target faces for the likelihood of having feminine, masculine, and gender-neutral attributes. Attributes used in ratings included items from three different gender stereotype domains (i.e., traits, activities, and occupations) in order to provide a more complete examination of the beauty-issex-typed stereotype than has been assessed previously. Results showed that both adults and children subscribe to the beauty-is-sex-typed stereotype, but for female targets only: All participants rated high attractive females significantly higher than low attractive females on having feminine traits, activities, and occupations. Additionally, children but not adults rated attractive females higher than unattractive females on gender-neutral attributes. In contrast, all participants rated males, regardless of attractiveness, as equally masculine and gender-neutral in attributes. Children’s results did not appear to depend on the cognitive skill of multiple classification even though expressing a beauty-is-sex-typed stereotype conceptually requires noticing both a target’s gender and attractiveness. Secondary results included that all participants showed stronger cross-sex-typed stereotypes for activities and occupations than traits. Taken together, these results have important implications for the development of both attractiveness stereotyping and gender stereotyping. Even in young children, attractiveness stereotypes consist of both sex-relevant (“beauty is good”) and sex-irrelevant (“beauty is sex-typed”) components, and these components include traits, activities, and occupations. Moreover, gender stereotypes of female targets, at least for adults and children in middle childhood, seem to depend on the attractiveness of the targets.