EXPRESS: Comparing Person and People Perception: Multiple Group Members Do Not Increase Stereotype Priming

A characteristic feature of daily life is encountering people in groups. Surprisingly, however, at least during the initial stages of processing, research has focused almost exclusively on the construal of single individuals. As such, it remains unclear whether person and people (i.e., group) perception yield comparable or divergent outcomes. Addressing this issue, here we explored a core social-cognitive topic — stereotype activation — by presenting both single and multiple facial primes in a sequential-priming task. In addition, the processes underlying task performance were probed using a drift diffusion model analysis. Based on prior work, it was hypothesized that multiple (vs. single) primes would increase stereotype-based responding. Across two experiments, a consistent pattern of results emerged. First, stereotype priming was insensitive to the number of primes that were presented and occurred only at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (i.e., 250 ms). Second, priming was underpinned by a bias toward congruent (vs. incongruent) prime-target responses. Collectively these findings advance understanding of the emergence and origin of stereotype priming during person and people perception.

Differences in Explicit Stereotype Activation among Social Groups Based on the Stereotype Content Model: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence in Chinese Sample

The stereotype content model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick and Xu, 2002) identifies four basic categories of stereotyped social groups: high warmth-high competence (HW-HC), high warmth-low competence (HW-LC), low warmth-high competence (LW-HC), and low warmth-low competence (LW-LC). However, many of these groups have not been directly examined in stereotype activation research. The purpose of the present research was to extend stereotype activation research to groups that more fully represent those identified under the SCM. Employing explicit sequential priming task, participants responded to prime-target stimulus pairs that were either congruent or incongruent with stereotypes of social groups from all four SCM quadrants in two studies in the current investigation. Study 1 was to determine the behavioral pattern of explicit stereotype activation among four quadrants (the sample included 60 Chinese undergraduate students, 51%—female). Study 2 further employed event-related brain potentials (ERPs) technique to track the time course and electrophysiological underpinnings of explicit stereotype activation (the sample included 22 right-handed Chinese undergraduate students, 76%—female). In Study 1, participants responded more quickly and accurately on stereotype congruent trials than incongruent trials for all social groups except LW-LC groups. This reverse priming effect on LW-LC social groups in RTs was also replicated in Study 2. ERPs findings further showed that incongruent targets elicited larger N400 amplitudes than congruent targets for all four SCM quadrants. Moreover, congruent targets elicited larger P2 than incongruent targets, but only found for the LW-LC social groups. In addition, congruent targets elicited larger amplitudes of late positive component than incongruent targets for the low warmth (LW-LC and LW-HC) groups. Together, these results highlight the unique processing that LW-LC groups receive throughout the cognitive stream, ultimately manifesting in distinctive behavioral responses. Unconscious activation of egalitarian goals, disgust, and distrust accounts are discussed.

Attitudes of Healthcare Professionals Towards Older Adults’ Abilities to Use Digital Technology (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Digital technologies (DT) for older adults focus mainly on healthcare, and are considered to have the potential to improve the wellbeing of older adults. However, adoption rates of such DT is considered low. While previous research has investigated possible reasons for adoption and acceptance of DT, age-based stereotypes (of e.g. healthcare professionals) towards the abilities of older adults to use DT have yet to be considered as possible barriers to adoption of DT. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the role of ageism and negative attitudes related to DT, as a specific domain of ageism that might influence the use and adoption of DT in healthcare. METHODS A new measurement of Attitudes Towards Older Adults Using Technology (ATOAUT-10) was developed and used in two studies. Study I described the development of the ATOAUT-10 scale using a principal component analysis, and further examines healthcare professionals’ attitudes towards the use of healthcare DT and correlations with ageism. Study II further explored the correlation between ageism and ATOAUT in an experimental design with healthcare professionals. RESULTS In study I, physiotherapists (N=97) rated older adults as young as 50, as less able to use healthcare DT compared to younger adults (p < 0.001). A multiple regression analysis revealed that higher levels of ageism were predictive of more negative ATOAUT, beyond other predictors (β = 0.36, t = 3.73, p < 0.001). In Study II the salience of age was manipulated. Healthcare professionals (N=93) were randomly assigned to rate the abilities of a young or old person to use healthcare DT. Old age salience moderated the correlation between ageism and ATOAUT (R2 = 0.19, F(6,85) = 3.35, p = 0.005), such that higher levels of ageism correlated with more negative ATOAUT, in the old age salient condition, but not the young condition. Stereotype activation accounted for healthcare professionals’ attitudes, more than experience of working with older patients or the professional’s age. CONCLUSIONS Negative and ageist attitudes of healthcare professionals can potentially affect how older adults are viewed in relation to DT, and consequently influence actual use and adoption of technology-based treatment. Future studies should broaden the validation of the ATOAUT scale by focusing on the discriminatory aspect of ageism, as well as self-ageism of older adults. This study calls for a focus on ageism as a determinant of adoption of DT.

Elderspeak in Acute Hospitals? The Role of Context, Cognitive and Functional Impairment

Older adults are often exposed to elderspeak, a specialized speech register linked with negative outcomes. However, previous research has mainly been conducted in nursing homes without considering multiple contextual conditions. Based on a novel contextually-driven framework, we examined elderspeak in an acute general versus geriatric German hospital setting. Individual-level information such as cognitive impairment (CI) and audio-recorded data from care interactions between 105 older patients ( M = 83.2 years; 49% with severe CI) and 34 registered nurses ( M = 38.9 years) were assessed. Psycholinguistic analyses were based on manual coding (κ = .85 to κ = .97) and computer-assisted procedures. First, diminutives (61%), collective pronouns (70%), and tag questions (97%) were detected. Second, patients’ functional impairment emerged as an important factor for elderspeak. Our study suggests that functional impairment may be a more salient trigger of stereotype activation than CI and that elderspeak deserves more attention in acute hospital settings.

Stereotype Threat Among Black Men Following Exposure to Rap Music

Stereotype threat theory argues that reminders of negative stereotypes about one’s stigmatized identity can undermine performance, but few studies have examined this phenomenon among Black Americans. Drawing from the literature on the impact of mass media on stereotype activation, we examine whether exposure to rap music induces stereotype threat among Black men. In two studies, incidental exposure to violent/misogynistic rap, but not conscious hip-hop or pop music, impaired Black (but not White) men’s cognitive performance (Experiments 1 and 2), but only when the artist was ostensibly Black (vs. White; Experiment 2). These effects were conditionally mediated by stereotype activation, such that listening to a Black (but not White) rapper activated negative stereotypes about Black people for both Black and White participants but only impaired performance among Black participants (Experiment 2). This suggests that exposure to some forms of artistic expression may activate culturally shared stereotypes and obstruct academic success among stigmatized groups.

Stereotype-based priming without stereotype activation: A tale of two priming tasks

An extensive literature has demonstrated stereotype-based priming effects. What this work has only recently considered, however, is the extent to which priming is moderated by the adoption of different sequential-priming tasks and the attendant implications for theoretical treatments of person perception. In addition, the processes through which priming arises (i.e., stimulus and/or response biases) remain largely unspecified. Accordingly, here we explored the emergence and origin of stereotype-based priming using both semantic- and response-priming tasks. Corroborating previous research, a stereotype-based priming effect only emerged when a response-priming (vs. semantic-priming) task was used. A further hierarchical drift diffusion model analysis revealed that this effect was underpinned by differences in the evidential requirements of response generation (i.e., a response bias), such that less evidence was needed when generating stereotype-consistent compared with stereotype-inconsistent responses. Crucially, information uptake (i.e., stimulus bias, efficiency of target processing) was faster for stereotype-inconsistent than stereotype-consistent targets. This reveals that stereotype-based priming originated in a response bias rather than the automatic activation of stereotypes. The theoretical implications of these findings are considered.