Effects of hearing and vision impairments on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment

Many standardized measures of cognition include items that must be seen or heard. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon to overlook the possible effects of sensory impairment(s) on test scores. In the current study, we investigated whether sensory impairments could affect performance on a widely used screening tool, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). Three hundred and one older adults (mean age = 71 years) completed the MoCA and also hearing and vision tests. Half of the participants had normal hearing and vision, 38% impaired hearing, 5% impaired vision, and 7% had dual-sensory impairment. More participants with normal sensory acuity passed the MoCA compared to those with sensory loss, even after modifying scores to adjust for sensory factors. The results suggest that cognitive abilities may be underestimated if sensory problems are not considered and that people with sensory loss are at greater risk of cognitive decline.     

“Unskilled” Workers: Social Skills Stereotypes Affect Evaluations of Biracial Job Applicants

Why do Black/White workers earn wages similar to Black workers ($6.30 less per hour than White workers), despite encountering less negative, anti-Black sentiment from others? We propose that Black/White workers must contend with stereotypes suggesting that biracial people are socially unskilled. In the present study we observed that, regardless of whether job candidates were rejected for external reasons (interviewer prejudice) or whether candidates acted in undesirable ways (claimed discrimination), participants rated Black/White applicants as less socially skilled and as more likely to have demonstrated poor interview skills than Black applicants. Implications for biases against hiring biracial people are discussed.     

Your mistakes are mine: Self-other overlap predicts neural response to observed errors

This study examined whether the degree to which one perceives overlap between the self and another person predicts the magnitude of the neural response of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) following the observation of that person’s errors. Specifically, we measured the magnitude of the observational feedback-related negativity (oFRN), an event-related potential associated with observing someone else make an error, while participants watched strangers or friends complete a Stroop task. Results show stronger activation of the ACC, as indexed by the oFRN, for those who observed friends compared to those who observed strangers. This effect was mediated by the degree to which participants included the other in their conception of the self. This study contributes a unique examination of real-life close pairs to a growing body of research showing that social factors can greatly impact neural processing.     

The interplay of individual differences,norms, and group identification in predicting prejudiced behavior in online video game interactions

Despite the increasing popularity of video games and the diversity of people who play, prejudice remains common in online gaming. In the current study, we use structural equation modeling to test the role of social norms, individual differences, and gamer identification as predictors of how likely someone is to report engaging in prejudiced behavior while playing online video games. We also test the relative importance of these predictors to assess how likely people are to confront prejudice when it occurs in online video games. Participants (N = 384) completed a series of questionnaires to assess their attitudes and perceptions of online gaming norms, as well as to report their own prejudiced and confrontation behavior in video games. We found that both social norms and individual differences are significant predictors of behavior in online gaming. The more normative people report prejudice to be, the more they report making prejudiced comments. Similarly, the more normative confrontation of prejudice is reported to be, the more likely people are to report confronting prejudice. The more people endorsed generally prejudiced attitudes, the more likely they were to report making prejudiced remakes in online gaming and the less likely they were to report confronting prejudiced remarks. These results provide a foundation to inform interventions to reduce prejudice in gaming and indicate that both individual differences and norms are important to consider when designing interventions.     

Impressions at the intersection of ambiguous and obvious social categories: Does gay + Black = likable?

How do perceivers combine information about perceptually obvious categories (e.g., Black) with information about perceptually ambiguous categories (e.g., gay) during impression formation? Given that gay stereotypes are activated automatically, we predicted that positive gay stereotypes confer evaluative benefits to Black gay targets, even when perceivers are unaware of targets' sexual orientations. Participants in Study 1 rated faces of White straight men as more likable than White gay men, but rated Black men in the opposite manner: gays were liked more than straights. In Study 2, participants approaching Whites during an approach–avoidance task responded faster to straights than gays, whereas participants approaching Blacks responded faster to gays than straights. These findings highlight the striking extent to which less visible categories, like sexual orientation, subtly influence person perception and determine the explicit and implicit evaluations individuals form about others.     

The effect of age-related stereotypes on response initiation and execution

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated the effects of positive and negative stereotypes of older adults on response initiation and execution. College students were first primed with the word young or the word old, and then produced an aimed hand movement in response to a positive or negative trait. Results of the 1st experiment indicated that the participants produced the fastest and most forceful movements when the word "old" primed negative traits; they produced the slowest and least forceful responses when the word old primed positive traits. In a 2nd experiment, the authors replicated these effects by using only the prime old. The results suggest that ageist responses extend beyond reaction time in a social judgment task.     

“The world around me”: The environment and single women

The environment has often been taken as a backdrop for feminist research and theory, as a setting within which issues of feminist concern are played out. This environment, however, is not a neutral setting; rather, research over the past 15 years has evidenced the assumptions about a woman's place as a man's wife literally built into women's worlds. Space speaks, and the stories it tells center around particular and identifiable assumptions about gender and where a woman should be, when, and with whom. Unmarried women are in a unique position in this environment: they are subjected not only to the economic disadvantages and social subjugation of being a woman, but also to the social and economic drawbacks of being single in a couple-oriented society and in an environment they see as not built for them. Although research exists on the sexism in the physical environment, on women's economic and social position, and on singlehood, a need exists to bridge these areas to explore how single women experience their singlehood, their womanhood, and the environment in their everyday lives and decision making. I conducted in-depth interviews with 25 single women, 23 white and 2 African-American women, about their experiences of living single. This article, based on the results of those interviews and a series of focus group discussions, examines how single women negotiate and respond to their necessary environmental decisions about housing, transportation, and leisure activities in an environment not likely to be conducive to their ways of life.This article is based on my M.A. thesis at the University of Tennessee (1992) and as such would not have happened without the guidance of my thesis committee: Samuel Wallace (chair), Donald Hastings, and Suzanne Kurth. For the preparation of this article, Suzanne Kurth offered her patience and invaluable criticisms to countless drafts, and Sherry Cable gave an early draft a thorough and helpful reading. I also wish to thank two anonymousSex Roles reviewers, whose comments guided this piece into this form. Parts of this paper were presented at the Southern Sociological Meetings in New Orleans, April 1992, and at the Second Annual Continental Conference on Social Ecology, Townsend, Tennessee, May 1992.     

Examining inhibition of return with multiple sequential cues in younger and older adults

Studies with younger adults have shown that when multiple peripheral cues are presented sequentially, inhibition of return (IOR) occurs at several locations with the greatest IOR at the most recently cued location and the least at the earliest cued location. The inhibitory ability needed to tag multiple locations requires visuospatial working memory, and it is thought that this type of memory may be vulnerable to the effects of aging. The present experiments examined whether older adults would show less IOR at multiple cued locations than younger adults when placeholders were present (Experiment 1) and absent (Experiment 2). Of interest, in both experiments older adults showed an almost identical pattern of IOR, in both magnitude and number of inhibited locations, to that of younger adults. This finding, in conjunction with research on memory-guided saccades, suggests that there may be a form of visuospatial working memory, specific to oculomotor and visual attention processes, that is relatively resistant to the effects of aging.     

The ironic impact of activists: Negative stereotypes reduce social change influence

Despite recognizing the need for social change in areas such as social equality and environmental protection, individuals often avoid supporting such change. Researchers have previously attempted to understand this resistance to social change by examining individuals' perceptions of social issues and social change. We instead examined the possibility that individuals resist social change because they have negative stereotypes of activists, the agents of social change. Participants had negative stereotypes of activists (feminists and environmentalists), regardless of the domain of activism, viewing them as eccentric and militant. Furthermore, these stereotypes reduced participants' willingness to affiliate with ‘typical’ activists and, ultimately, to adopt the behaviours that these activists promoted. These results indicate that stereotypes and person perception processes more generally play a key role in creating resistance to social change. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.