Nicknames and sex role stereotypes

Since nicknames are a very fluid component of language, they become a useful tool for revealing current sex role stereotypes. A study of 380 nicknames collected from 175 young women and men ages 14–19 shows that males assign most nicknames and males receive more names based on surnames; also, connotations of strength, largeness, hardness, and maturity are typical of male nicknames. For female nicknames, physical attributes are more important, and connotations are typically of beauty, pleasantness, kindness, and goodness. Nicknames do not reflect much difference in activity, however, a quality that in earlier studies is associated predominantly with males.     

The elementary school: training ground for sex role stereotypes

“Sexism starts with kindergarten activities in which little girls are directed fo the housekeeping corner, while boys are steered toward blocks and trucks.”     

Embodied mood regulation: the impact of body posture on mood recovery,negative thoughts,and mood-congruent recall

Previous work has shown that a stooped posture may activate negative mood. Extending this work, the present experiments examine how stooped body posture influences recovery from pre-existing negative mood. In Experiment 1 (n?=?229), participants were randomly assigned to receive either a negative or neutral mood induction, after which participants were instructed to take either a stooped, straight, or control posture while writing down their thoughts. Stooped posture (compared to straight or control postures) led to less mood recovery in the negative mood condition, and more negative mood in the neutral mood condition. Furthermore, stooped posture led to more negative thoughts overall compared to straight or control postures. In Experiment 2 (n?=?122), all participants underwent a negative mood induction, after which half received cognitive reappraisal instructions and half received no instructions. Mood-congruent cognitions were assessed through autobiographical memory recall. Again, stooped (compared to straight) position led to less mood recovery. Notably, this was independent of regulation instruction. These findings demonstrate for the first time that posture plays an important role in recovering from negative mood.     

Examination of adolescents' negative thoughts, depressive mood, and family environment.

The focus of this study was the relationship among adolescents' negative thoughts, depressive mood, and family environment. Three hundred eleven students (aged 16 and 17 years) in public and private schools served as subjects. They were administered the Family Environment Scale, the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, and the Beck Depression Inventory. Family cohesion was found to be related to the degree of negative thoughts and depressive mood of the adolescents, but perceived control within the family was not.     

The conceptual structure of sex role stereotypes in college students

This study investigated sex stereotypes as natural language categories. Ten years ago, sex stereotypes were found to have a core-peripheral structure similar to that of the nonevaluative categories studies by Rosch (1973). Changes and stability in these conceptions were studied by having 56 female and 56 male undergraduate students rate 217 adjectives on Likert scales according to how well each adjective represented their own view of typical Men or Women. Mean ratings were analyzed to reveal a structure of core, peripheral, and nonmembers for Men and for Women. As was the case ten years ago, core traits reflected dimensions of “niceness-nurturance” for Women and “potency-strength” for Men. Female students also viewed Women as “competent,” while male students also viewed Women as “socially effective.” Adjectives that constituted the core for one category were generally placed in the periphery for the other category. As compared to ten years ago, the peripheries of the categories were expanded and showed a greater degree of overlap. College students' conceptions of Men and Women are best characterized as overlapping rather than as bipolar opposites. The formation of sex stereotype categories was discussed in terms of cognitive and social learning processes.     

Death thoughts mediate ostracism mood reduction: The moderating role of marital status

Ostracism is known to cause psychological distress; however, it remains unclear why ostracism evokes this response. Two experiments tested empirically whether fear of death mediates ostracism distress (mood) and whether marital status moderates this role. A total of 345 participants played Cyberball with two other ostensible players. After the game, accessibility of death-related thoughts was assessed by a word completion task, and a mood questionnaire was used to measure their distress. Death thoughts fully mediated ostracism distress. Marital status moderated this mediation effect in that no moderation was observed in married participants, suggesting that marriage may buffer death anxiety. The discussion centers on the ways in which these findings contribute to the ostracism and terror management literature by providing empirical evidence that death thoughts mediate ostracism distress, and the moderating effects of marriage on this mediation effect.     

The relationship between sex role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics among college students

The relationship between sex role stereotypes and characteristics perceived as necessary for management success was examined among male and female undergraduate management students and compared with results of managers today as well as with those of managers studied 15 years ago. Male management students, similar to their managerial counterparts in the 1980s and 1970s, still adhere to the male managerial stereotype and perceive that successful middle managers possess characteristics, attitudes, and temperaments more commonly ascribed to men in general than to women in general. Female management students, similar to today's female managers, no longer sex type the managerial job, a change from the female managers of the 1970s. Implications of these outcomes for undergraduate management education are discussed.Portions of this research were funded by a Gettysburg College Institutional Self Renewal Grant.     

Illusory correlation and the maintenance of sex role stereotypes in children

The present work tested the hypothesis that children would perceive illusory correlations leading to greater recall of events that confirm rather than disconfirm sex-stereotypic beliefs. In the study, 33 second graders and 34 fourth graders were shown slides of adult males and females engaged in traditional sex role activities, nontraditional activities, and gender-neutral activities. Frequency judgments of the occurrence of each Stimulus Type x Stimulus Sex category served as the dependent measure. In actuality there was no correlation between gender and activity type in the stimulus set. As expected, both age groups perceived illusory correlations, giving the highest frequency estimates to traditional stimuli and the lowest frequency estimates to nontraditional stimuli. Individual differences in level of stereotyped attitudes had no effect on this cognitive bias. Results are discussed in terms of gender schema theory and the maintenance of sex role stereotypes.This research was supported by grants to the first author from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. We wish to express our appreciation to Lynn Liben and Margaret Signorella for the use of their stimuli. We would also like to thank the administrators, teachers, and students whose cooperation made the project possible. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 59th annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Buffalo, NY, April 1988.     

Effects of sex of subject,sex of stimulus cue,and androgyny level on evaluations in work situations which evoke sex role stereotypes

This study examined the differential evaluation of male and female stimulus cues and the effect of subject's androgyny level on their evaluations. Male and female college students filled out the Bem Sex Role Inventory (1974) and responded to set of five in-basket tasks taken from the Rosen, Jerdee, and Prestwich (1975) study of male managers. Sex of subject, sex of stimulus cue in the in-basket tasks, and androgyny level were varied in a series of 2 X 2 X 3 analyses of variance. On some tasks, male and/or female subjects responded in a sex role stereotyped manner. There were no effects for androgyny level. The discussion focused on circumstances under which stereotyping occurs and implications of the study.     

The effect of negative performance stereotypes on learning

Stereotype threat (ST) research has focused exclusively on how negative group stereotypes reduce performance. The present work examines if pejorative stereotypes about women in math inhibit their ability to learn the mathematical rules and operations necessary to solve math problems. In Experiment 1, women experiencing ST had difficulty encoding math-related information into memory and, therefore, learned fewer mathematical rules and showed poorer math performance than did controls. In Experiment 2, women experiencing ST while learning modular arithmetic (MA) performed more poorly than did controls on easy MA problems; this effect was due to reduced learning of the mathematical operations underlying MA. In Experiment 3, ST reduced women's, but not men's, ability to learn abstract mathematical rules and to transfer these rules to a second, isomorphic task. This work provides the first evidence that negative stereotypes about women in math reduce their level of mathematical learning and demonstrates that reduced learning due to stereotype threat can lead to poorer performance in negatively stereotyped domains.     

Suppressing and focusing on a negative memory in social anxiety: effects on unwanted thoughts and mood

Researchers have hypothesized that thought suppression contributes to the large volume of unwanted thoughts in anxiety disorders. However, comparisons to both non-suppression and non-anxious groups are necessary for studies on thought suppression in high anxiety. Participants completed a series of thought verbalization periods and a social interaction. During one period, participants were randomly assigned to focus upon a negative social memory, suppress it, or think freely while monitoring the memory. Results indicated that thought suppression and focusing caused a greater rise and subsequent decline in unwanted thoughts than monitoring instructions for both high and low social anxiety groups. Importantly, highly socially anxious participants had more unwanted thoughts overall, but did not respond significantly differently to thinking instructions when compared to the less anxious group. Interestingly, highly socially anxious participants did report more thought suppression attempts in their everyday life. They also appeared to benefit by experiencing less shyness after suppression when compared to focusing, a pattern not evident for the low social anxiety group.     

Differentiation in judgements of self and others: The role of self-consciousness

This study investigated the role of individual differences in Private and Public self-consciousness (SC) on differentiation of self and others in judgements of personality. Ss judged themselves and six other familiar persons on personality constructs derived from a modified Rep Grid procedure. Results showed that the judgements of high scorers on Private SC exhibited greater within-self and self-other differentiation than those of low scorers. There was no significant influence of Private SC on differentiation of other stimulus persons. Public SC had no significant influence on any of the measures of differentiation. The findings were discussed in terms of previous research on self-awareness, the specificity of measures of self-consciousness, and Duval and Wicklund's attentional model of self-awareness.     

Children's perceptions of occupational sex stereotypes

Female and male children ranging in age from 21/2 to 8 years were asked to indicate for each of 10 occupations whether a male or a female adult would be most likely to engage in the occupation. Five traditionally male and five traditionally female occupations were presented in random orders. The results indicated that the children at each age level made a significant distinction between the two occupational groupings, with the extent of the distinction increasing with age level. There were no significant effects involving the sex of the children. The results were interpreted as indicating the learning of adult stereotypes concerning the sex appropriateness of occupations by children as young as 21/2; years old. The potential implications of this sex stereotype for actual career decisions and aspirations were discussed.The authors would like to express their appreciation to the principal, M. Brady Thomas, and the teachers at Hickory Grove Elementary School for their help during the study. The order of authorship was randomly determined.     

Comparison of positive and negative intrusive thoughts and experimental investigation of the differential effects of mood.

The similarity between positive and negative intrusive thoughts is considered for both recently occurring, personally relevant intrusions and for the same intrusions occurring during an experimental task involving self-monitoring. The results indicate that positive and negative intrusions differ in most respects. There was evidence that increasing the frequency of negative thinking is associated with a deterioration of mood. In a subsequent experiment, induced happy and sad moods were shown to differentially affect frequency of intrusions in a fashion consistent with mood congruency effects previously found in experiments on the effect of mood on memory. The implications of these findings for disorders involving the experience of intrusive thoughts such as OCD and depression are discussed.     

On bad mood and white bears: The effects of mood state on ability to suppress unwanted thoughts

Does temporary mood influence people's ability to engage in effective thought suppression? Based on past research on mental control and recent work on affective influences on social cognition, this experiment predicted and found that negative mood improved and positive mood impaired people's ability to suppress their thoughts when instructed not to think of a neutral concept, white bears. We also found clear evidence for ironic rebound effects: on a subsequent generative task, intrusions of the suppressed thought were greater in the negative than in the positive mood group. Participants received positive or negative feedback about performance on a supposed creativity task to induce positive or negative moods, and then engaged in two consecutive generative writing tasks, the first accompanied by instructions to suppress thoughts of white bears. Those in a negative group reported fewer “white bear” intrusions when attempting to suppress, but more “white bear” intrusions (an ironic rebound effect) in the subsequent task when the suppression instruction was lifted. The implications of these results for everyday tasks of mental control, and for recent affect–cognition theories are discussed.