Study And Intervention Of Aging Stereotype Of University Students

The stereotype has always been one of the focuses of the Social Psychology. With the rise of the research on Cognitive Psychology, the research on implicit stereotype became more and more deeply and refined.The majority of the research on stereotype centered on the race and gender, there were less studies on aging stereotype. China has become an ageing society with the problems such as particularity of the population policy, the rapid development of medical and health services and so on, a series of social phenomenon caused by age issues attract more and more attentions. This essay adopts the experimental research methods to explore the existence and variability of university students' aging stereotyped. The exploration can be divided into three parts.The first, to explore the existence of the students' explicit aging stereotype, and then, find the differences by comparing the different students'scores .129 university students are investigated by the Semantic Differential Scale, the result shows:(1) The explicit evaluations for the old and the young have no obvious difference;(2) There have no effects on sex, subject and birthplace of the students' explicit aging stereotype.The second, to explore the existence of implicit aging stereotype and it's relation to explicit aging stereotype. The study of three dimensions (physical, personal-expressive and cognitive) are measured by IAT on 122 students shows:(1)Students of implicit aging stereotype exist objectively. What's more, they hold negative attitude to the old and the positive attitude to the young;(2) The implicit age stereotype has no obvious differences between male and female;(3) On implicit aging stereotype, physical aging stereotype is stronger than the other two stereotyped dimensions, it's mean of IAT effect value is relatively larger;(4) There has no correlation between explicit and implicit aging stereotype of the college students.The third, 69 undergraduates participated in the experiment and was divided into two groups, to explore the variability of the undergraduates' implicit aging stereotype by using Evaluative Conditioning (EC) during IAT test, and research the continuity of intervention . The result shows:(1) The evaluating reflexes EC can reduce students' implicit aging stereotype. The effect variation before and 10 minutes after intervention of two groups was significantly different, however the effect variation before and 10 minutes after intervention of the control group was not significantly different;(2) The effect of intervention has a certain continuity. The IAT effect before and 24 hours intervention of two groups still be different obviously, however the effect variation before and 24 hours after intervention of the control group was not significantly different;(3) Implicit aging stereotype has a relative stability. Whether or not to accept intervention training, the subjects always preferred to link positive words to the young, but associate negative words with the old .