The Effects Of Negative Gender Meta-stereotype On Individual Attention Bias

Meta-stereotype refers to the beliefs hold by ingroup members that outgroup member would view them in a stereotyping way.In current society,sexual meta-stereotype still has impact on individuals' mental health and social function.There are plenty evidences showing that the performance of women in various domain was more likely to be affected by stereotype threat,compared with men.Investigating the mechanism of how negative sexual meta-stereotype would impact the emotional and cognitive function would be beneficial,in both improving inter-group relationship(especially for women)and promoting mental health.To that end,the present study intended to explore the consequence of activation of negative sexual meta-stereotype incommon participants by threeexperiments.The purpose of experiment one was to investigate the effectiveness of meta-stereotype activation based on the inter-group anxiety model,while paying attention to the gender differences in the activation of meta-stereotypes.In this experiment,a 2(sex:male vs.female)x 2(activated condition:activated group vs.control group)complete randomized design was conducted.In total,61 healthy participants(27 male,34 female)was randomly assigned into activated group or control group,then completed the intergroup anxiety scale.Results showed that participants in activated group felt significantly intergroup anxious than those who in control group.Moreover,the interaction between sex and activated condition was of marginal significance,indicating that female tended to feel more intergroup anxious than male in activated condition.Since the relation between negative sexual meta-stereotype and intergroup anxiety was evidenced in experiment one,the aim of experiment two was to further explore if negative sexual meta-stereotype would cause the attentional bias toward threatening information relative to self.In this experiment,a2(sex:male vs.female)x 2(activated condition:activated group vs.control group)x 2(stimuli type:men-related threats vs.women-related threats)mixed design was conducted.In total,112 participants(54 male,58 female)was randomly assigned into activated group or control group,completing the intergroup anxiety scale and the dot probe task to measure attentional bias.The stimuli used in the experiment two was derive from the open interview carried in experiment one.Unexpectedly,although results showed a strong effect of activated condition on intergroup anxiety(activated group was more intergroup anxious than control group),there was no main effect or interaction related with activated condition.The only significant finding in attentional bias indexes was the main effect of sex,suggesting female were more likely to display a attentional avoidance than male,regardless of activation.Based on the null result in the experiment two,the aim of the experiment three was to replicated the impact of negative sexual meta-stereotype on threat attentional bias.Previous studies showed that dot probe task has poor measurement property,which might lead to the insensitivity in measuring attentional bias.To test this possibility,a more reliable measure(visual search task)and additional memory indexes were used in the third experiment.This experiment was a 2(sex:male vs.female)×2(activated condition:activated group vs.control group)×2(stimuli type:men-related threats vs.women-related threats)mixed design.In total,95 participants(47 male,48 female)was randomly assigned into activated group or control group,completing the intergroup anxiety scale and the visual search task,followed by a surprising memory task.Consistent with two previous experiment,the results in the experiment three suggested that activated group experienced more intergroup anxious than control group.As regard to the attentional bias indexes,the interaction of activated condition and stimuli type was significant,showing that activated group displayed a stronger attentional bias toward female-related threat,compared to control group.However,there was no significant correlations between intergroup anxiety and bias indexes.As for memory indexes,instead of revealing a pattern of memory bias for threatening information,the findings in recognition task seemed to indicated that the activation of negative sexual meta-stereotype would impair the performance(more memory error and longer recognizing time).Based on the results of the three experiments,this study believes that inter-group anxiety can be used as an effective measure of whether a negative gender stereotype is activated or not.On this basis,the relationship between negative meta-stereotype and attention bias is examined.Through the use of two different research paradigms,it is found that negative meta-stereotypes only lead to attentional bias in visual search tasks,possibly because the visual search paradigm is more sensitive to the measurement of attentional bias..Future studies should further explore the impacts of negative sexual meta-stereotype by carrying out more fine-grained design,such as controlling the anxiety trait and depressive state of participants,or using advanced approaches(e.g.EEG or fMRI).