Self-affirmation And Gender Stereotypes Threat Effects Female College Students On Cognitive Processing And Emotion

The participants of this study were female college students. The purpose is to know thefemale college students in the face of gender stereotypes in the negative impact ofdiscrimination and prejudice, and the effect of self-affirmations resist gender stereotype threat.Self-affirmation refers to the intensive part of self that is unrelated to the threaten field, makeindividual less feel attack after feeling threatened. Stereotype threat refers to someone holds anegative stereotype for a group, when individuals exist in a situation that may fullfill thenegative stereotypes,he will worry that others judge, evaluate himself in a negative evaluation,make him felt threatened and stress (Steele,1995).This study use paper and pencil test, included two experiments. In experiment1, thepurpose is to examine the negative impact of gender discrimination to female collegestudents, and use self’-affirmation to resist negative impact.120female college studentsin Shenyang Normal University are participants in this experiment, they were randomlyassigned into two experimental situations that within or without gender discrimination,and half of this two groups participants were self-affirmation. Then participants need tobe finished a cognitive work in a short time and fill a emotional scale. Experimentalresults shows that:(1) Without gender discrimination, self-affirmation can significantlyimprove the ability of finished work, can’t reduce the negative emotions, but increasehappiness.(2) Without self-affirmation, gender discrimination reduced the ability to finis-h cognitive work, increased the feelings of anger and hurt, the happiness and sad wasnot significant changed.(3) Within gender discrimination, self-affirmation can’t changethe ability to finish cognitive work, but reduce anger, hurt and happiness. In experimen-ts2, choose60female college students in Shenyang Normal University that are hurtedby the gender bias, distribution for self-affirmation group and the control group. Theyshould finish cognitive work in short time,then fill emotion scale. Results shows that:(1)Within self-affirmation, the cognitive work scores much higher than the group with-out self-affirmation, the sense of injury were reduced, and the feeling of happiness wereincreased, but anger and sadness don’t have significant difference. In short, this studyfound that female college students who were self-affirmation could reduces the negative impact of gender discrimination and gender bias, reduce the negative emotions, enhanc-e the positive emotions. This inspires educators should reduce the not fair attitude instudents’ life, recognized their personality traits, strengthen their positive self evaluationand self impression, make college students more confident in study and in life.