When stereotype threat makes me more or less intelligent: The informative role of emotions in effort mobilization and task performance.

Studies have shown that affective states could be used as diagnostic information for the assessment of situational demands and that, as such, they can regulate resource mobilization. Accordingly, it was found that negative feelings cause overestimation of situational demands, which then leads to effort mobilization during performance on easy tasks but disengagement on difficult tasks. The present research investigated whether this emotion-motivation link could explain the usual differences in achievement on easy and difficult tasks under stereotype threat (ST). In Study 1, participants in ST, no-ST, and no-ST with fear induction conditions had to resolve a series of easy logical problems. As expected, ST and no-ST-fear groups reported higher effort investment and achieved better performance than the no-ST group. In the following two studies, the no-ST-fear condition was replaced by an ST condition in which the informative potential of threat-related feelings was prevented before the task performance. Although participants under ST reported similar elevation in anxiety, the expected increase in easy task performance (Study 2) and decrease in difficult task performance (Study 3) were observed only in the standard ST groups. Taken together, our findings suggest that threat-related feelings could govern motivational processes and account for the effect of ST.

Working memory span tasks: Group administration and omitting accuracy criterion do not change metric characteristics.

The study examined the psychometric characteristics of three automated working memory span tasks: operational, reading, and symmetry span task, administered in groups of participants. For each task, the metric characteristics of six scoring procedures were evaluated: partial, absolute, partial non-weighted, absolute non-weighted, partial weighted, and absolute weighted scoring. Metric characteristics of all measures were compared across two parallel analyses: with and without application of a typical 85% accuracy criterion on the processing component of the tasks. The study demonstrates that the group administration of span tasks does not compromise their psychometric characteristics. All the tasks had an adequate internal consistency with Cronbach's αs equal to or above .70; the exception being all types of the symmetry span task absolute scores with α values close to .60. Furthermore, all tasks have satisfactory convergent construct validity as well as criterion validity estimated in relation to measures of fluid intelligence. Omitting the 85% accuracy criterion on the processing component of the span tasks did not impair their psychometric properties. Thus, it is recommended that researchers discard this accuracy criterion as a criterion for filtering the results for further statistical analyses.