An ERP Study On Undergraduates' Gender-Occupational Stereotype

As a special stereotype, gender-stereotype had become anactive field in social cognitive research during the pasttwenty years. Some researchers had demonstrated the existenceof gender-occupational stereotype. The present study usedevent-related potential(ERP) to test brain cortical reactivitywhen one encountered gender-occupational stereotype, and alsoexamined consciously inhibition of stereotype.Subjects' ages ranged from 19 to 23 years. They were askedto complete a sentence comprehending task. A total of 160experimental sentences were used in this research. Eachsentence contained an occupational noun and a personal pronoun.These sentences were defined as matched or mismatched.Sentences were pseudo-randomized prior to presentation. Theywere presented in a word-by-word manner, After the presentationof each sentence, subjects were instructed to decide whetherthe personal pronoun and occupational noun matched.In all subjects, pronouns in the two kinds of sentenceselicited obvious late positive wave, which can begin atabout 260ms after pronouns onset and maybe sustained to 650ms.From 260ms to 650ms, pronouns in mismatched sentences elicit-ted larger amplitude in all subjects as compared to those in1atched ones at C3, CZ, C4, CP3, CPZ, CP4, P3, PZ, P4, P7, P8, and thelargest-amplitude differences were observed at parietal sites.These results showed that subjects attended to the genderinformation during the reading course, furthermore, it showedthe special process sites of gender-stereotype violatinginformation.The examination of consciously inhibition of stereotypeshowed that gender-occupational stereotype has very strongstability. Moreover, the present study indicated that social information processing also follows the brain hemispheredominant effects in natural information processing.