The Impact Of Stereotype Impression On Memory Of The Elderly And Its Coping Style: The Role Of Working Self - Concept

With the acceleration of global population aging process, topics related to old people’s mental and physical health have received much more attention. These studies are designed to improve old people’s life quality and to properly deal with the challenges population aging has brought to economic development, social progress and construction of a harmonious society. Among which, the cognitive impairment, especially memory loss, has been common in the elderly population and brought a lot of inconvenience for their interpersonal communication and other daily life, seriously affecting their life quality. Previous studies have mostly discussed memory related issues from the perspective of physiology, psychopathology, and cognitive psychology rather than social cognitive processing. Following the extended research of behavioral priming effect, the effect of stereotype threat on older adults’ memory decline has gradually received wide attention.As an important social cognitive factor that affects memory performance, memory-related negative stereotypes towards old people have been pervasive and persistent and take effect on old people’s physical and mental health via stereotype threat. Based on Wheeler’s et al. (2007) active-self account, priming certain construct (such as stereotype) can selectively activate self-representations that exist in the chronically stable self-concept, which in turn serve to guide subsequent behavior. The shifting array of continually active self-representations dependent on the ongoing events is called working self-concept.First, based on the active-self account, experiment 1 explored the effect of stereotype threat on old people’s working self-concept and memory performance and analyzed the role of working self-concept in the relationship between stereotype threat and memory performance. Older adults were randomly assigned to stereotype threat and control groups, followed by a modified Stroop color naming task measuring working self-concept and a recognition task measuring memory performance. The results prove that stereotype threat prime altered the activation of working self-concept with negative self-representations achieving the mental dominance and deteriorated old people’s memory performance. What’s more, working self-concept mediated the relationship between stereotype threat and memory performance of old people.According to experiment 1,working self-concept and memory change in the same direction with negative stereotypes, considering that old people endorse both negative and positive stereotypic identities, experiment 2 was designed to eliminate or buffer stereotype threat effect by priming different stereotypic identities of older adults who were confronted with stereotype threat towards their memory ability, in which we expect that priming different stereotypic identities of older adults would also be able to suppress the negative (or positive) self-representations dominating working self-concept and improve (or decrease) memory performance of older adults. Older adults were randomly assigned to one of four intervening groups:stereotype threat group, positive stereotypic identity group (prime positive stereotype identity, such as "wisdom"), negative stereotypic identity group (prime negative stereotype identity, such as "recession") and multiple stereotypic identities group (prime both positive and negative stereotypic identity, "wisdom" and "recession"), then participants finished a modified Stroop color naming task and a recognition task.Results in experiment 2 indicated that, compared with the stereotype threat group, priming a positive stereotypic identity suppressed the activation level of negative self-representations and increased memory performance slightly; activation level of negative self-representations in multiple stereotypic identities activation group were also significantly suppressed and memory performance was significantly improved; while negative stereotype identity group showed more significantly activated negative self-representations without improvement in memory performance. Therefore, results of study 2 proved that, priming positive and multiple stereotypic identities could effectively buffer the activation of negative self-representations and in turn improve memory performance, with priming multiple stereotypic identities showing the utmost intervention effect; while priming negative stereotypic identity showed little suppression of negative self-representations and memory performance showed no improvement either. The results in experiment 2 further confirm the covariant relations among stereotype threat, working self-concept and memory performance among the elderly.