Research On Processing Mechanism Of Multiple Social

Psychologists generally believe that classifying of things will help people to simplify information and make cognitive activities more effective. In the field of social cognition, classifying of things is known as social category processing. Scholars obtain a consistent point of view about the social category processing simplifying cognition, but there has been controversy over when the category processing starts and whether it is fully automated or under certain conditions. In addition, previous researches are mainly focus on the stage of social category characteristics processing, not involving the stage of social category class activation. Therefore, this study on the basis of summing up past researches focused on exploring the process of social category class activation and divided class activation into encoding level and retrieval level. The results show that:(1) Under the premise of the one-dimensional category, age and gender category class activation are all up to the encoding level. In other words, Individuals will automatically encode object’s age and sex category class then store in subconscious.(2) Under the premise of the multi-dimensional category, age and gender category class activation are also all up to the encoding level. In other words, Individuals will automatically encode object’s age and sex category class simultaneously then store in subconscious.(3) Age and gender category will weaken each other’s degree of automation in the encoding of their classes. And the degree of automation in the encoding of age category class may be higher than the degree of automation in the encoding of gender category class.(4) Age and gender category class activation are all not up to the retrieval level. In other words, encoding results do not promote explicit categorization task performance.(5) Explicit categorization of age category class will inhibit the explicit categorization of gender category class, while explicit categorization of gender category class will promote the explicit categorization of age category class. Extraction of age category class are more easily stimulated.(6) Gender features of young faces are more obvious than old faces and age features of old faces are more obvious than young faces(7) Age features of female faces are more obvious than male faces. Or compared with men, individuals are more concerned about the age of the women.