Effects Of Metastereotype Threat On Cognitive Processing In Immigrant Children: The Mediating Role Of Intergroup Anxiety

Meta-stereotype refers to a person‘s beliefs regarding the stereotype that out-group members hold about their own group.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 recent research on meta-stereotype was focused on its effect factor,mechanism,effect on the intergroup relationship etc.but the mechanism of the meta-stereotype threat effects on cognition remains unclear.With the accelerating process of urbanization,more and more children migrated to urban with his parents.On accounting of the change of urban and rural cultural background and the household registration system,migrant children become the disadvantaged group of the society.The negative meta-stereotype impacts migrant children increasingly,however,the influence of negative meta-stereotype on migrant children‘s cognition has not been thoroughly investigated.It is necessary to discuss how the activating of negative meta-stereotype impacts the emotion and the cognitive function of the migrant children.The research examing the scope of attention and working memory by Global-local and N-back study.Participants were instructed to write descriptive adjectives to evoke negative meta-stereotype or not according to different instructions.Then,participants were assigned to either the meta-stereotype threat(MST)condition and explore the inter-group anxiety and recognize under different conditions.The following results were observed:(1)The intergroup anxiety under the MST condition was higher than the case of non-MST condition.(2)The Global bias score of MST condition was significantly lower than that of the non-MST condition,The local bias score of MST condition was significantly higher than that of the non-MST condition,the reaction time of local bias was significantly higher than those in the non-MST condition.(2)The accuracy of the MST condition was significantly lower than that of the non-MST condition across the 0-,1-,2-back working memory tasks.Moreover,the accuracy in the MST and the non-MST condition both decreased significantly with the task difficulty growing.(3)In the 0-,1-,2-back working memory tasks,the reaction time of participants in the MST condition was significantly higher than those in the non-MST condition,and in the MST condition,the reaction time significantly increased with the increase of difficulty,the interaction between the group and the type of working memory was significant.(4)The relationship between the meta-stereotype and the accuracy of working memory(medium difficulty)was entirely mediated by the intergroup anxiety.The relationship between the meta-stereotype and the reaction time of working memory(medium difficulty)was partially mediated by the intergroup anxiety.