A Study On The Threat Effect Of Meta-stereotypes In Impoverished College Students

Meta-stereotype refers to a person's beliefs regarding the stereotype that out-group members hold about their own group.Negative meta-stereotype can make individuals experience a situational pressure,gender anything from physiological stress responses to meta-cognitive doubt to undermine performance,which is called meta-stereotype threat(Sun,He & Luo,2015).Based on the definition of meta-stereotypes from the cognitive perspective,directed to the blind spots and bottlenecks in the existing research for meta-stereotype activation,the details are as follows: First,most of these research were done from an intergroup relations-centered and emotional perspective,the mechanism of the meta-stereotype on cognition still lacks of further study;Second,the study of neural mechanism after activation of meta-stereotype is still blank.The current research would take advantages of the ERP technique,combined with behavioral and electrophysiological measurements,learning from the Research Paradigm of the Cognitive Mechanism of stereotype threat to test the neural mechanism of meta-stereotype activation.Impoverished college students are a group worthy of attention.They not only need taking on heavy stress of study but also economical difficulty.Compared with non-impoverished college student,impoverished college students may perceive more discrimination.Meta-stereotype can be negative,neutral or positive(e.g.,thinking that an out-group holds a positive stereotype about the in-group),and which is easier to be activated in disadvantaged group.In summary,the present study would focus on impoverished college students,and three groups of experiments were designed in this study.In the first study,using interview method to explore the characteristics of meta-stereotype of Impoverished College students(study 1);in the second study,using Dot Detection Task Paradigm to explore the threat effect after Meta-stereotype activation of impoverished College students(study 2);the third study,using the classic Stroop paradigm and using ERPs to explore the cognitive neural mechanism of the effect of meta-stereotype threat.The major findings as follows:(1)Meta-stereotypes of impoverished college students had both positive,neutral and negative attributes.Specifically,impoverished college students held a significant negative metastereotype.(2)In the emotional self-rating scale,the threat group experienced more worry sadness,betrayal,and shame than the non-threat group.(3)In the Dot detection task,the participants in the threat group showed more attention bias to negative stimuli than those in the non-threat group.As shown below,the response time of the threat group was significantly higher than that of the non-threat group,and the response time of compatibility trials was significantly lower than that of the incompatibility trials.(4)ERPs results show that the effects of activation of meta-stereotype on cognition are reflected in the early threat perception and conflict monitoring components——N2 and P2,and the late inhibitory processing component P3,that is to say,individuals can deal with the dominant reaction caused by meta-stereotype through perception supervise and control inhibition,but at the same time this process and the selection of appropriate responses require more cognitive resources.