scholarly journals Older Adults’ Emotion Recognition Ability Is Unaffected by Stereotype Threat

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lianne Atkinson ◽  
Janice E. Murray ◽  
Jamin Halberstadt

Eliciting negative stereotypes about ageing commonly results in worse performance on many physical, memory, and cognitive tasks in adults aged over 65. The current studies explored the potential effect of this “stereotype threat” phenomenon on older adults’ emotion recognition, a cognitive ability that has been demonstrated to decline with age. In Study 1, stereotypes about emotion recognition ability across the lifespan were established. In Study 2, these stereotypes were utilised in a stereotype threat manipulation that framed an emotion recognition task as assessing either cognitive ability (stereotypically believed to worsen with age), social ability (believed to be stable across lifespan), or general abilities (control). Participants then completed an emotion recognition task in which they labelled dynamic expressions of negative and positive emotions. Self-reported threat concerns were also measured. Framing an emotion recognition task as assessing cognitive ability significantly heightened older adults’ (but not younger adults’) reports of stereotype threat concerns. Despite this, older adults’ emotion recognition performance was unaffected. Unlike other cognitive abilities, recognising facially expressed emotions may be unaffected by stereotype threat, possibly because emotion recognition is automatic, making it less susceptible to the cognitive load that stereotype threat produces.

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna Doucet ◽  
Bo Shao ◽  
Lu Wang ◽  
Greg R. Oldham

Purpose – Previous research has demonstrated the importance of emotion recognition ability in negotiations and leadership, but scant research has investigated the role of emotion recognition ability in service contexts. The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a compensatory model in which service employees’ emotion recognition ability helps enhance their job performance, particularly when employees score low on the agreeableness personality dimension or have low cognitive ability. Design/methodology/approach – With a two-wave multisource dataset collected from a service center of a large retail bank, multiple regression analysis was used to test the moderating roles of agreeableness and cognitive ability on the relationship between service employees’ emotion recognition ability and their performance. Findings – Service employees’ emotion recognition ability helped enhance their job performance. However, the positive effect of emotion recognition ability on job performance was only statistically significant when employees’ agreeableness or cognitive ability was low. Practical implications – The findings have important implications for how service organizations select and recruit employees. In particular, service employees with low agreeableness or cognitive ability may still be able to perform well when possessing high emotion recognition ability. Therefore, emotion recognition ability should be considered in the selection and recruitment process. Originality/value – Going beyond self-report measures of emotion recognition and using a performance measure from organizational records, this study is one of the first to examine how emotion recognition ability interacts with personality and cognitive ability in predicting service employees’ effectiveness in a service organization.


Author(s):  
Ruediger Kissgen ◽  
Sebastian Franke ◽  
Moritz Susewind ◽  
Maya Krischer

Background: Few studies in clinical attachment research to date have examined children with an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis. This is surprising for two reasons: first, there are a number of parallels between the behaviors of children with an insecure and disorganized attachment and the behaviors of children with an ADHD diagnosis. Second, secure attachment has a positive effect on the development of skills in areas in which children with ADHD demonstrate problems (e.g., attention span, impulse control). There are currently no findings on whether or not and how insecure and disorganized attachment and ADHD affect children’s emotion recognition ability. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study, part exploratory and part hypothesis-driven in the context of basic research. A clinical sample of 5- to 10-year-old children with an ADHD diagnosis and their parents is to be compared to a non-clinical unaffected control group. Over a period of 3 years, 80 subjects and their parents are to be recruited in each group for participation in the study. Discussion: This study is the first to examine links between attachment, emotion recognition ability, and ADHD. It is also the first to include not just children with ADHD but also their mothers and fathers in its design. The findings should help reduce the research gap and generate more knowledge for family interventions in the case of ADHD.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (7) ◽  
pp. 1876-1887
Author(s):  
Sandrine Kalenzaga ◽  
David Clarys ◽  
Pascale Piolino

The present study aimed at exploring the effect of stereotype threat on the controlled part of memory in older adults using a deep level of processing, namely, self-reference encoding. To meet this objective, 25 younger adults and 25 older adults performed a Remember/Know recognition task following self-reference versus other-reference encoding of adjective traits, under stereotype threat or not. The results indicated that under stereotype threat, older adults’ production of Remember responses was specifically impaired following self-reference encoding. Moreover, whereas executive functioning and group identification did not moderate stereotype threat effect, measure of self-worth did. These findings suggest that stereotype threat in older adults may be a self-concept threat and that moderators of stereotype threat found in other groups (i.e., group identification and executive functioning) may not be generalised to this group. Rather, as stereotype threat in aging may represent a threat to the self, self-worth might have a central role, whereby individuals with high self-worth remain self-confident even under stereotype threat and are thus able to down-regulate their negative affects to face such a threat.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S455-S456
Author(s):  
Francesco Vailati Riboni ◽  
Francesco Pagnini

Abstract Age-based stereotype threat (ABST) occurs when older adults are influenced by negative stereotypes about age-related decline and functional losses and ironically behave in disengaging and self-defeating ways that confirm the stereotype (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Aging stereotypes are found to be strong predictors of health and illness outcomes in later life, and are associated with performance in specific areas, mainly in cognitive and physical domains. The current study reviewed the experimental methods and their reported effects previously published in the literature to determine if there were different ABST methods were associated with different types of age-related outcomes. We conducted a systematic review, screening the scientific literature for papers that included experimental manipulation of age-related stereotypes as an independent variable, focusing on samples of older adults (1113 articles, most published after 2003). Through a classification of the common and distinctive characteristics of the different stereotype manipulation techniques, we were able to identify three specific types of experimental methods: by instruction, tests, and interpersonal exposure. Although the mechanism by which stereotypes are associated with functional outcomes in older adults remains unclear, our review suggests it is possible to experimentally control the activation of the stereotype by manipulating its specific characteristics and the way older participants are exposed to it. Findings also highlight the possibility that specific experimental methods used to induce ABST in older individuals may lead to unique and different consequences on functional performance variation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Cyril Jaksic ◽  
Katja Schlegel

The ability to accurately judge others’ personality and the ability to accurately recognize others’ emotions are both part of the broader construct of interpersonal accuracy (IPA). However, little research has examined the association between these two IPA domains. Little is also known about the relationship between personality judgment accuracy and other socio-emotional skills and traits. In the present study, 121 participants judged eight traits (Big Five, intelligence, cooperativeness, and empathy) in each of 30 targets who were presented either in a photograph, a muted video, or a video with sound. The videos were 30 second excerpts from negotiations that the targets had engaged in. Participants also completed standard tests of emotion recognition ability, emotion understanding, and trait emotional intelligence. Results showed that personality judgment accuracy, when indexed as trait accuracy and distinctive profile accuracy, positively correlated with emotion recognition ability and was unrelated to emotion understanding and trait emotional intelligence. Female participants were more accurate in judging targets’ personality than men. These results provide support for IPA as a set of correlated domain-specific skills and encourage further research on personality judgment accuracy as a meaningful individual difference variable.


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