Firm father figures: A moderated mediation model of perceived authoritarianism and the intergenerational transmission of gender messages from fathers to sons.

How do men develop sexist attitudes, gender role conflict, and subjective masculinity stress? These questions have been given little attention in the literature. Given the strong relationships between these variables and men's poorer mental health, it is essential to understand their antecedents. This study seeks to elucidate the manner in which perceptions of fathers may influence sons' gender attitudes and experiences. Using a sample of 170 undergraduate men, the authors proposed a model in which perceived paternal modeling of masculine norms and perceived paternal sexist communication mediate the relationship between perceived paternal authoritarianism and our three outcome variables: sons' sexism, gender role conflict, and subjective masculinity stress. They also hypothesized that the father-son relationship quality would moderate these mediating relations. Results were consistent with a model in which both perceived paternal modeling of masculine norms and perceived paternal sexist communication mediated the relationship between perceived paternal authoritarianism and sons' sexism. However, only the indirect effects from perceived paternal authoritarianism to gender role conflict and subjective masculinity stress through perceived paternal sexist communication were significant. Two significant moderated mediation findings underscore the complexities of the father-son relationship-the quality of this relationship was a risk factor for sons' sexism but a protective factor for sons' subjective masculinity stress. These results suggest an intricate portrait of the perceived influence of fathers on their sons' gender development and stress. Practical implications for counseling psychologists as they relate to both counseling and prevention are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Configural face processing impacts race disparities in humanization and trust.

The dehumanization of Black Americans is an ongoing societal problem. Reducing configural face processing, a well-studied aspect of typical face encoding, decreases the activation of human-related concepts to White faces, suggesting that the extent that faces are configurally processed contributes to dehumanization. Because Black individuals are more dehumanized relative to White individuals, the current work examined how configural processing might contribute to their greater dehumanization. Study 1 showed that inverting faces (which reduces configural processing) reduced the activation of human-related concepts toward Black more than White faces. Studies 2a and 2b showed that reducing configural processing affects dehumanization by decreasing trust and increasing homogeneity among Black versus White faces. Studies 3a-d showed that configural processing effects emerge in racial outgroups for whom untrustworthiness may be a more salient group stereotype (i.e., Black, but not Asian, faces). Study 4 provided evidence that these effects are specific to reduced configural processing versus more general perceptual disfluency. Reduced configural processing may thus contribute to the greater dehumanization of Black relative to White individuals.

Generalization versus contextualization in automatic evaluation revisited: A meta-analysis of successful and failed replications.

To account for disparate findings in the literature on automatic evaluation, Gawronski, Rydell, Vervliet, and De Houwer (2010) proposed a representational theory that specifies the contextual conditions under which automatic evaluations reflect initially acquired attitudinal information or subsequently acquired counterattitudinal information. The theory predicts that automatic evaluations should reflect the valence of expectancy-violating counterattitudinal information only in the context in which this information had been learned. In contrast, automatic evaluations should reflect the valence of initial attitudinal information in any other context, be it the context in which the initial attitudinal information had been acquired (ABA renewal) or a novel context in which the target object had not been encountered before (ABC renewal). The current article presents a meta-analysis of all published and unpublished studies from the authors' research groups regardless of whether they produced the predicted pattern of results. Results revealed average effect sizes of d = 0.249 for ABA renewal (30 studies, N = 3,142) and d = 0.174 for ABC renewal (27 studies, N = 2,930), both of which were significantly different from zero. Effect sizes were moderated by attention to context during learning, order of positive and negative information, context-valence contingencies during learning, and sample country. Although some of the obtained moderator effects are consistent with the representational theory, others require theoretical refinements and future research to gain deeper insights into the mechanisms underlying contextual renewal.

Stereotype threat and executive functions: which functions mediate different threat-related outcomes?

Stereotype threat research shows that women's math performance can be reduced by activating gender-based math stereotypes. Models of stereotype threat assert that threat reduces cognitive functioning, thereby accounting for its negative effects. This work provides a more detailed understanding of the cognitive processes through which stereotype threat leads women to underperform at math and to take risks, by examining which basic executive functions (inhibition, shifting, and updating) account for these outcomes. In Experiments 1 and 2, women under threat showed reduced inhibition, reduced updating, and reduced math performance compared with women in a control condition (or men); however, only updating accounted for women's poor math performance under threat. In Experiment 3, only updating accounted for stereotype threat's effect on women's math performance, whereas only inhibition accounted for the effect of threat on risk-taking, suggesting that distinct executive functions can account for different stereotype threat-related outcomes.

On the experience of feeling powerful: perceived power moderates the effect of stereotype threat on women's math performance.

This research examined whether feeling powerful can eliminate the deleterious effect of stereotype threat (i.e., concerns about confirming a negative self-relevant stereotype) on women's math performance. In Experiments 1 and 2, priming women with high power buffered them from reduced math performance in response to stereotype threat instructions, whereas women in the low and control power conditions showed poorer math performance in response to threat. Experiment 3 found that working memory capacity is one mechanism through which power moderates the effect of threat on women's math performance. In the low and control power conditions, women showed reduced working memory capacity in response to stereotype threat, accounting for threat's effect on performance. In contrast, women in the high power condition did not show reductions in working memory capacity or math performance in response to threat. This work demonstrates that perceived power moderates stereotype threat-based performance effects and explains why this occurs.

Impact of negation salience and cognitive resources on negation during attitude formation.

Because of the increased cognitive resources required to process negations, past research has shown that explicit attitude measures are more sensitive to negations than implicit attitude measures. The current work demonstrated that the differential impact of negations on implicit and explicit attitude measures was moderated by (a) the extent to which the negation was made salient and (b) the amount of cognitive resources available during attitude formation. When negations were less visually salient, explicit but not implicit attitude measures reflected the intended valence of the negations. When negations were more visually salient, both explicit and implicit attitude measures reflected the intended valence of the negations, but only when perceivers had ample cognitive resources during encoding. Competing models of negation processing, schema-plus-tag and fusion, were examined to determine how negation salience impacts the processing of negations.

The Role of Motivational and Persuasive Message Factors in Changing Implicit Attitudes Toward Smoking.

The current work examined the extent to which nicotine level affects the receptiveness of cigarette smokers to a compelling (strong) or a specious (weak) antismoking, public service announcement (PSA). The combination of nicotine loading (i.e., having just smoked a cigarette) and a strong antismoking PSA led to significantly more negative implicit evaluations of cigarettes; however, explicit evaluations were not changed by nicotine level or PSA quality. Smokers' implicit evaluations of cigarettes were affected only by compelling PSAs when they had recently smoked but not when they were nicotine deprived or when they viewed weak PSAs. Because implicit evaluations of cigarettes predict deliberate smoking-related decisions, it is important to understand which factors can render these implicit evaluations relatively more negative.

The effect of negative performance stereotypes on learning.

Stereotype threat (ST) research has focused exclusively on how negative group stereotypes reduce performance. The present work examines if pejorative stereotypes about women in math inhibit their ability to learn the mathematical rules and operations necessary to solve math problems. In Experiment 1, women experiencing ST had difficulty encoding math-related information into memory and, therefore, learned fewer mathematical rules and showed poorer math performance than did controls. In Experiment 2, women experiencing ST while learning modular arithmetic (MA) performed more poorly than did controls on easy MA problems; this effect was due to reduced learning of the mathematical operations underlying MA. In Experiment 3, ST reduced women's, but not men's, ability to learn abstract mathematical rules and to transfer these rules to a second, isomorphic task. This work provides the first evidence that negative stereotypes about women in math reduce their level of mathematical learning and demonstrates that reduced learning due to stereotype threat can lead to poorer performance in negatively stereotyped domains.

Generalization versus contextualization in automatic evaluation.

Research has shown that automatic evaluations can be highly robust and difficult to change, highly malleable and easy to change, and highly context dependent. We tested a representational account of these disparate findings, which specifies the conditions under which automatic evaluations reflect (a) initially acquired information, (b) subsequently acquired, counterattitudinal information, or (c) a mixture of both. The account postulates that attention to contextual cues during the encoding of evaluative information determines whether this information is stored in a context-free representation or a contextualized representation. To the extent that attention to context cues is low during the encoding of initial information but is enhanced by exposure to expectancy-violating counterattitudinal information, initial experiences are stored in context-free representations, whereas counterattitudinal experiences are stored in contextualized representations. Hence, automatic evaluations tend to reflect the valence of counterattitudinal information only in the context in which this information was learned (occasion setting) and the valence of initial experiences in any other context (renewal effect). Four experiments confirmed these predictions, additionally showing that (a) the impact of initial experiences was reduced for automatic evaluations in novel contexts when context salience during the encoding of initial information was enhanced, (b) context effects were eliminated altogether when context salience during the encoding of counterattitudinal information was reduced, and (c) enhanced context salience during the encoding of counterattitudinal information produced context-dependent automatic evaluations even when there was no contingency between valence and contextual cues. Implications for automatic evaluation, learning theory, and interventions in applied settings are discussed.

Stereotype threat prevents perceptual learning.

Stereotype threat (ST) refers to a situation in which a member of a group fears that her or his performance will validate an existing negative performance stereotype, causing a decrease in performance. For example, reminding women of the stereotype "women are bad at math" causes them to perform more poorly on math questions from the SAT and GRE. Performance deficits can be of several types and be produced by several mechanisms. We show that ST prevents perceptual learning, defined in our task as an increasing rate of search for a target Chinese character in a display of such characters. Displays contained two or four characters and half of these contained a target. Search rate increased across a session of training for a control group of women, but not women under ST. Speeding of search is typically explained in terms of learned "popout" (automatic attraction of attention to a target). Did women under ST learn popout but fail to express it? Following training, the women were shown two colored squares and asked to choose the one with the greater color saturation. Superimposed on the squares were task-irrelevant Chinese characters. For women not trained under ST, the presence of a trained target on one square slowed responding, indicating that training had caused the learning of an attention response to targets. Women trained under ST showed no slowing, indicating that they had not learned such an attention response.

Capitalizing on multiple social identities to prevent stereotype threat: the moderating role of self-esteem.

One troubling aspect of membership in a stigmatized group is that negative stereotypes about the group's performance affect one's personal performance (i.e., stereotype threat). Women who are made aware of the negative stereotype that "women are bad at math" perform worse than women who are not made aware of this stereotype. However, women can use an "escape hatch" to avoid stereotype threat by identifying with another social identity (i.e., college students) that has positive stereotypes for math performance and having greater feelings of self-worth. This research shows that women who had greater self-esteem and were presented with an alternative, positive social identity were buffered from stereotype threat by eliminating working memory decrements responsible for poor math performance. Women lower in self-esteem, however, did not benefit from a positive, alternative social identity when it was available and thus fell prey to stereotype-based working memory and performance decrements.

The simple life: on the benefits of low self-complexity.

This article examines the spillover amplification hypothesis, which proposes that because people lower in self-complexity experience stronger responses to life events they will show relatively better well-being in the presence of positive factors (e.g., better social support) and relatively poorer well-being in the presence of negative factors (e.g., a history of negative experiences). Across three studies, support for spillover amplification was found. Specifically, people lower in self-complexity revealed greater self-esteem, less depression, and fewer illnesses when they had greater social support (Study 1) and more desirable personality characteristics (Study 2), yet they had poorer well-being if they had a history of many negative life events (Study 3). Thus, how one's self-concept is represented in memory moderates the relationship between many well-established factors and well-being.

Multiple social identities and stereotype threat: imbalance, accessibility, and working memory.

In 4 experiments, the authors showed that concurrently making positive and negative self-relevant stereotypes available about performance in the same ability domain can eliminate stereotype threat effects. Replicating past work, the authors demonstrated that introducing negative stereotypes about women's math performance activated participants' female social identity and hurt their math performance (i.e., stereotype threat) by reducing working memory. Moving beyond past work, it was also demonstrated that concomitantly presenting a positive self-relevant stereotype (e.g., college students are good at math) increased the relative accessibility of females' college student identity and inhibited their gender identity, eliminating attendant working memory deficits and contingent math performance decrements. Furthermore, subtle manipulations in questions presented in the demographic section of a math test eliminated stereotype threat effects that result from women reporting their gender before completing the test. This work identifies the motivated processes through which people's social identities became active in situations in which self-relevant stereotypes about a stigmatized group membership and a nonstigmatized group membership were available. In addition, it demonstrates the downstream consequences of this pattern of activation on working memory and performance.

Arousal, processing, and risk taking: consequences of intergroup anger.

Intergroup emotions theory (IET) posits that when social categorization is salient, individuals feel the same emotions as others who share their group membership. Extensive research supporting this proposition has relied heavily on self-reports of group-based emotions. In three experiments, the authors provide converging evidence that group-based anger has subtle and less explicitly controlled consequences for information processing, using measures that do not rely on self-reported emotional experience. Specifically, the authors show that intergroup anger involves arousal (Experiment 1), reduces systematic processing of persuasive messages (Experiment 2), is moderated by group identification (Experiment 2, posttest), and compared to intergroup fear, increases risk taking (Experiment 3). These findings provide converging evidence that consistent with IET, emotions triggered by social categorization have psychologically consequential effects and are not evident solely in self-reports.

Forming implicit and explicit attitudes toward individuals: social group association cues.

The authors explored how social group cues (e.g., obesity, physical attractiveness) strongly associated with valence affect the formation of attitudes toward individuals. Although explicit attitude formation has been examined in much past research (e.g., S. T. Fiske & S. L. Neuberg, 1990), in the current work, the authors considered how implicit as well as explicit attitudes toward individuals are influenced by these cues. On the basis of a systems of evaluation perspective (e.g., R. J. Rydell & A. R. McConnell, 2006; R. J. Rydell, A. R. McConnell, D. M. Mackie, & L. M. Strain, 2006), the authors anticipated and found that social group cues had a strong impact on implicit attitude formation in all cases and on explicit attitude formation when behavioral information about the target was ambiguous. These findings obtained for cues related to obesity (Experiments 1 and 4) and physical attractiveness (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, parallel findings were observed for race, and participants holding greater implicit racial prejudice against African Americans formed more negative implicit attitudes toward a novel African American target person than did participants with less implicit racial prejudice. Implications for research on attitudes, impression formation, and stigma are discussed.

Stereotype threat and working memory: mechanisms, alleviation, and spillover.

Stereotype threat (ST) occurs when the awareness of a negative stereotype about a social group in a particular domain produces suboptimal performance by members of that group. Although ST has been repeatedly demonstrated, far less is known about how its effects are realized. Using mathematical problem solving as a test bed, the authors demonstrate in 5 experiments that ST harms math problems that rely heavily on working memory resources--especially phonological aspects of this system. Moreover, by capitalizing on an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms by which ST exerts its impact, the authors show (a) how ST can be alleviated (e.g., by heavily practicing once-susceptible math problems such that they are retrieved directly from long-term memory rather than computed via a working-memory-intensive algorithm) and (b) when it will spill over onto subsequent tasks unrelated to the stereotype in question but dependent on the same cognitive resources that stereotype threat also uses. The current work extends the knowledge of the causal mechanisms of stereotype threat and demonstrates how its effects can be attenuated and propagated.

Implicit theories about groups and stereotyping: the role of group entitativity.

The consequences of holding an entity (i.e., the belief that a group's characteristics are fixed) or incremental (i.e., the belief that a group's characteristics are malleable) implicit theory about groups was examined for stereotyping and perceptions of group entitativity. Two studies showed that implicit theories about groups affect stereotyping by changing perceptions of group entitativity. Study 1 found that entity theorists were more likely to stereotype than incremental theorists and that perception of group entitativity significantly accounted for this relation. In Study 2, implicit theories of groups were manipulated via instruction set and entity theorists stereotyped more and perceived groups as more entitative than incremental theorists. Again, the effect of implicit theory was significantly, although partially, mediated by perceptions of group entitativity. The roles of implicit theories about groups and perceptions of group entitativity are discussed regarding stereotyping.

Of two minds: forming and changing valence-inconsistent implicit and explicit attitudes.

Because different processes underlie implicit and explicit attitudes, we hypothesized that they are differentially sensitive to different kinds of information. We measured implicit and explicit attitudes over time, as different types of attitude-relevant information about a single attitude object were presented. As expected, explicit attitudes formed and changed in response to the valence of consciously accessible, verbally presented behavioral information about the target. In contrast, implicit attitudes formed and changed in response to the valence of subliminally presented primes, reflecting the progressive accretion of attitude object-evaluation pairings. As a consequence, when subliminal primes and behavioral information were of opposite valence, people formed implicit and explicit attitudes of conflicting valence.

Understanding implicit and explicit attitude change: a systems of reasoning analysis.

There is considerable controversy about how to conceptualize implicit and explicit attitudes, reflecting substantial speculation about the mechanisms involved in implicit and explicit attitude formation and change. To investigate this issue, the current work examines the processes by which new attitudes are formed and changed and how these attitudes predict behavior. Five experiments support a systems of reasoning approach to implicit and explicit attitude change. Specifically, explicit attitudes were shaped in a manner consistent with fast-changing processes, were affected by explicit processing goals, and uniquely predicted more deliberate behavioral intentions. Conversely, implicit attitudes reflected an associative system characterized by a slower process of repeated pairings between an attitude object and related evaluations, were unaffected by explicit processing goals, uniquely predicted spontaneous behaviors, and were exclusively affected by associative information about the attitude object that was not available for higher order cognition.

On the causal mechanisms of stereotype threat: can skills that don't rely heavily on working memory still be threatened?

Recent work suggests that stereotype threat (ST) harms performance by reducing available working memory capacity. Is this the only mechanism by which ST can occur? Three experiments examined ST's impact on expert golf putting, which is not harmed when working memory is reduced but is hurt when attention is allocated to proceduralized processes that normally run outside working memory. Experiment 1 showed that well learned golf putting is susceptible to ST. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that giving expert golfers a secondary task eliminates ST-induced impairment. Distracting attention away from the stereotype-related behavior eliminates the harmful impact of negative stereotype activation. These results are consistent with explicit monitoring theories of choking under pressure, which suggest that performance degradation can occur when too much attention is allocated to processes that usually run more automatically. Thus, ST alters information processing in multiple ways, inducing performance decrements for different reasons in different tasks.