Recent negative focus on women's academic abilities has fueled disputes over gender disparities in the sciences. The controversy derives, in part, from women's relatively poorer performance in aptitude tests, many of which require skills of spatial reasoning. We used functional magnetic imaging to examine the neural structure underlying shifts in women's performance of a spatial reasoning task ...

THREAT BY ASSOCIATION: MINIMAL GROUP AFFILIATION AND ITS OUTCOMEFOR STEREOTYPE THREATbyERIC W. FULLERAugust 2010Adviser: Dr. Rusty McIntyre Major: Psychology (Social)Degree: Master of ArtsStereotype threat has been shown to be an important cause of performancedetriments in various social groups. It has also been theorized that stereotype threatcould be ap...

The authors hypothesized that activated self-stereotypes can influence the strategies of task solution by inducing regulatory foci. More specifically, positive self-stereotypes should induce a promotion focus state of eagerness, whereas negative stereotypes should induce a prevention focus state of vigilance. Study 1 showed that a negative ascribed stereotype with regard to task performance lea...

More than 100 articles have examined the construct of stereotype threat and its implications. However, stereotype threat seems to mean different things to different researchers and has been employed to describe and explain processes and phenomena that appear to be fundamentally distinct. Complementing existing models, the authors posit a Multi-Threat Framework in which six qualitatively distinc...

We tested whether informing women about stereotype threat is a useful intervention to improve their performance in a threatening testing situation. Men and women completed difficult math problems described either as a problem-solving task or as a math test. In a third (teaching-intervention) condition, the test was also described as a math test, but participants were additionally informed that ...

Prior research has found that positive affect, compared to negative affect, increases stereotype activation. In four experiments the authors explore whether the link between affect and stereotype activation depends on the relative accessibility of stereotype-relevant thoughts and response tendencies. As well as manipulating mood, the authors measured or manipulated the accessibility of egalitar...

When members of a stigmatized group find themselves in a situation where negative stereotypes provide a possible framework for interpreting their behavior, the risk of being judged in light of those stereotypes can elicit a disruptive state that undermines performance and aspirations in that domain. This situational predicament, termed stereotype threat, continues to be an intensely debated and...

We examined whether an individual difference factor, math domain identification, moderated performance following positive stereotype activation. We hypothesized that positive stereotype activation would improve performance for those more math identified (compared to a control condition), but would hinder performance for those less math identified. We examined 116 Chinese American women (mean ag...

in the culture can make us choke during tests of ability. . . . The power of stereotypes, scientists had long figured, lay in their ability to change the behavior of the person holding the stereotype. . . . But five years ago, Stanford University psychologist Claude Steele showed something else: It is the targets of a stereotype whose behavior is most powerfully affected by it. A stereotype tha...

Achievement gaps between social groups may result from stereotype threat effects but also from stereotype lift effects – the performance boost caused by the awareness that an outgroup is negatively stereotyped. We examined stereotype lift and threat effects in the motor domain and investigated their mediation by task involvement and self-confidence. Physiological (heart rate reactivity) and sel...