A Study Of The Emotional And Cognitive Effects Of Metastereotype Threat In Older Adults

Meta-stereotype is defined as the belief that in-group members expect out-group members to hold towards them.The activation of meta-stereotypes would lead the social psychological dilemma and cognitive imbalance,inducing the experience of stress and fear,undermine the behavior of group members.The research on meta-stereotype was focused on its influence factor,mechanism,effect on the inter-group relationship etc.But the mechanism of the meta-stereotype threat on cognition remains unclear.The aging society is coming,and the problems about the elderly have become increasingly prominent,therefore,the study field of aging in cognition function has been an important topic.Although the research on cognitive aging is getting deeper and deeper,it is mainly focused on brain cognitive function.In terms of social cognition,there is less.The negative meta-stereotype has an increasing influence on the elderly,Therefore,it is necessary to explore the effect of passive meta-stereotype on the emotional and cognitive processing of the elderly.The research designed two experiments to investigate the effect of emotional and cognitive after negative meta-stereotype activation on the elderly,adopt the Bio Neuro Infiniti instrument and N-back working memory task,by making the participants according to different instructions describing adjectives,manipulating the meta-stereotype threat(MST)condition and the non-MST condition.The results showed that:(1)In the non-MST condition,the meta-stereotype threat situation stimulated the subjects to be more irritable,and there was no significant difference in other emotions such as pleasure,tension,sadness,and fear.(2)Two groups of experimental subjects the galvanic skin and skin temperature of physiological indexes and the baseline value have significant difference,but in the MST condition,the skin temperature group physiological indexes change significantly greater than the amount in non-MST condition,galvanic skin physiological indexes variation in group is significant extent than in the non-MST condition,that in the MST condition,greater changes have taken place in the mood of the subjects.(3)In the two kinds of working memory task,the accuracy in the MST condition was significantly lower than that in the non-MST condition.With the increase in difficulty,the accuracy in both the MST condition and the non-MST condition were significantly reduced.(4)in the two kinds of working memory task,the reaction time in the MST condition was significantly higher than that in the non-MST condition.With the increase in difficulty,the reaction time in both the MST condition and the non-MST condition were significantly improved,and the interaction between group and task difficulty was significant.