Do High-Achieving Female Students Underperform in Private? The Implications of Threatening Environments on Intellectual Processing.

Stereotype threat research has demonstrated that stereotypes can harm student performance in the face of public evaluation by peers or an experimenter. The current study examined whether stereotypes can also threaten in private settings. Female students completed a math test in 3-person groups, which consisted of either 2 other women (same gender) or 2 men (minority). In addition, students either believed their performance would be broadcasted to their peers (public) or not (private). Results revealed that minority students performed worse than same-gender students in both public and private environments. This finding supports the concept of threatening intellectual environments and shows how far reaching the effects of stereotypes can be. The authors discuss these findings in relation to research on tokenism and to stereotype threat and its educational implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stereotype threat spillover: How coping with threats to social identity affects aggression, eating, decision making, and attention.

Stereotype threat spillover is a situational predicament in which coping with the stress of stereotype confirmation leaves one in a depleted volitional state and thus less likely to engage in effortful self-control in a variety of domains. We examined this phenomenon in 4 studies in which we had participants cope with stereotype and social identity threat and then measured their performance in domains in which stereotypes were not “in the air.” In Study 1 we examined whether taking a threatening math test could lead women to respond aggressively. In Study 2 we investigated whether coping with a threatening math test could lead women to indulge themselves with unhealthy food later on and examined the moderation of this effect by personal characteristics that contribute to identity-threat appraisals. In Study 3 we investigated whether vividly remembering an experience of social identity threat results in risky decision making. Finally, in Study 4 we asked whether coping with threat could directly influence attentional control and whether the effect was implemented by inefficient performance monitoring, as assessed by electroencephalography. Our results indicate that stereotype threat can spill over and impact self-control in a diverse array of nonstereotyped domains. These results reveal the potency of stereotype threat and that its negative consequences might extend further than was previously thought. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mind the gap: Increasing associations between the self and blacks with approach behaviors.

Although perceived differences between outgroup social categories and the self are often cited as a major contributor to prejudice and intergroup tension, surprisingly few studies have examined ways to improve associations between the self and racial outgroups. The present research investigated one strategy to increase these associations—approach training. Specifically, 3 studies investigated the impact of training participants to conceptually approach Blacks on 3 separate measures: 2 response latency measures indexing the strength of association between the self and Blacks and a psychophysiological measure indexing brain activity in response to Blacks in the context of the self. A fourth study examined the link between earlier research on the impact of approach training on implicit prejudice against Blacks and the current results related to self–Black associations. Together, these findings provided consistent evidence that training in approaching Blacks increases associations between the self and Blacks that in turn reduce implicit prejudice against Blacks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stereotype threat and executive resource depletion: Examining the influence of emotion regulation.

Research shows that stereotype threat reduces performance by diminishing executive resources, but less is known about the psychological processes responsible for these impairments. The authors tested the idea that targets of stereotype threat try to regulate their emotions and that this regulation depletes executive resources, resulting in underperformance. Across 4 experiments, they provide converging evidence that targets of stereotype threat spontaneously attempt to control their expression of anxiety and that such emotion regulation depletes executive resources needed to perform well on tests of cognitive ability. They also demonstrate that providing threatened individuals with a means to effectively cope with negative emotions--by reappraising the situation or the meaning of their anxiety--can restore executive resources and improve test performance. They discuss these results within the framework of an integrated process model of stereotype threat, in which affective and cognitive processes interact to undermine performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)