The Relationship Between Counterstereotype And Implicit Gender Stereotype: The Moderation Of Mood

Implicit stereotypes are social category associations that become activatedwithout the perceiver’s intention or awareness when he or she is presented with acategory cue. As a cognitive shortcut, implicit stereotypes can simplify the cognitiveprocessing but bring us some bad influence. Therefore so many researchers focus onthe reduction of implicit stereotype. The implicit stereotype begins with its activation,so the suppression of its activation is the best way to control implicit stereotypes.As an impotant part of social stereotypes, gender stereotype has drawn the focusof psychologists in the field of social cognition. A large amount of researcherssuppressed the activation of stereotype by activating the counterstereotype. However,previous studies in this field almost focused on the occupational gender stereotype, orgender-trait stereotype. There were little of studies about gender-subject stereotype.Although the gender differences in the subject can be neglected, people believe thatmen are better at math than women and women are better at speech than men fromchildhood. Such gender stereotype not only leads to individual differences in theactual performance in relevant fields, but also leads to the individual differences incareer choices in the future. The study of Chinese college students gender–subjectstereotypes, as well as the effects of counterstereotype has a certain practicalsignificance to promote the development of the individual and the improvement of theconcept of choosing occupation.It is noteworthy that previous studies on the counterstereotype ignored the moodof individual. That is, they held a potential hypothesis that everyone had the samemood. However, the mood of the individual changes rapidly, and different moods cancause different effects on the the cognitive processing. Studies have found that theaccessibility of information plays a key role in the effects of moods on cognition.Different moods influence the cognitive processing through the different accessibilityof information. Because the activation of counterstereotype makes it more accessibilethan gender stereotype, it is possible that mood plays a moderation between thecounterstereotype and gender stereotype.As the first step in the present dissertation, a comprehensive literature review was made with regard to implicit gender stereotypes, and then limitations about thisfield were analyzed. On the basis of this, three related studies were conducted with asample of 206 undergraduates to explore implicit gender-subject stereotype and itsrelationship with the suppression of counterstereotype and participants’mood.The findings are as follows:1 The implicit gender-subject stereotype existed significantly among Chineseundergraduates. There was no significant difference between participants’subjectsand gender. They tended to associate male with science and female with art.2 The counterstereotype could suppress the implicit gender-subject stereotypeeffectively.3 On one hand, the counterstereotype in positive mood weakened the genderstereotype compared with inactive counterstereotype, but the counterstereotype innegative mood increased the gender stereotype compared with inactivecounterstereotype. On the other hand, the effects of the counterstereotype weredifferent in positive or negative mood. Compared with the activation of thecounterstereotype in the negative mood, the activation of the counterstereotype in thepositive mood suppressed the gender stereotype more effectively. Totally, the moodmoderates the relationship between the counterstereotype and the gender-subjectstereotype.