Research Of Emotional Priming’s On Occupation-gender Stereotypes

Human is cognitive gambler. In order to successfully arrange the complexities of daily life, people have regularly deploy a variety of cognitive shortcuts such as schemas, stereotypes etc. This tendency is so stubborn that it will happen automatically, playing an invisible role of a close on human thought and behavior. Whenever individual encounters or merely considers members of stereotyped groups, stereotypes are generally considered will be commonly activated immediately. In other words, the impression will be usually automatically activated and unavoidable. That is true in the wide-variety categories on the stereotype, including race, gender, and age. Occupation-gender stereotypes are a continuation of the gender stereotypes. The traditional gender bias and career bias still remain a serious impact on the students themselves’employment status, especially in Chinese society that women have high expectations of family roles. Then this situation prompted scholars eager to change this seemingly deep-seated stereotypes and prejudices. Some research and exploration in recent years have shown that automatic stereotypes activation and application can be short-circuited by a wide variety of motivational forces, such as chronic and temporary chronic goal to be egalitarian, motivation to control prejudiced reactions, disavowing prejudiced attitudes and contextual factors and so on. Emotions also have an important impact on the stereotype, as a unique individual content. Existing studies have shown that positive emotions increase the stereotype activation or application, and increase the consistency between the rigid attitude of implicit and explicit, while negative emotions reduce stereotype activation, and reduce the consistency between the implicit and explicit stereotype attitude, when researcher evoke conscious emotional experience through music, video, and other methods. But other studies have shown that the negative emotions increase the use of stereotypes than positive emotions when subjects don’t experience the emotional state. But few people involve the relationship between implicit and explicit when subjects don’t have the emotional experience. Known in the literature, the study of unconscious emotional on stereotype activation or application is very little or no, but also there is no one direct contrast from the effect of the different level of consciousness on the stereotype. Large number of studies have shown that the neural pathways and response characteristics are different between supraliminal affecting stimuli and subliminal affecting stimuli.Then we assume that the individual subsequent cognitive processing tasks will be different.On the basis of taking example by the Chinese and foreign existing research, our research explores the effect of different level of consciousness emotional priming on the activation of implicit occupation-gender stereotypes and on the relationship between implicit and explicit. Specially,we make an direct contrast between supraliminal affecting priming effect and subliminal affecting priming effect. We select a total of90undergraduate and graduate students from Southwest University, who are randomly divided into three groups (30in each group), respectively, to accept the positive, negative and neutral (control group) emotional treatment. This study uses the way of repetition priming paradigm and selects pictures as stimulus material. We study the impact of different types of emotions (positive, negative and neutral) on the activation of implicit gender-occupational stereotypes, and then compare the accommodation of different priming ways and different emotional types (positive, negative, neutral) on the relationship between implicit and explicit occupational gender stereotypes, when emotional pictures were respectively presented from supraliminal and subliminal levels. Comprehensive results of this study, the conclusions are as follows:(1)The undergraduate students still generally hold the implicit occupation-gender stereotypes. They think strongly that men fit for certain occupations, yet women fit for else certain occupations.(2)Different pictures’affective priming effect(positive, negative and neutral) was different significantly. The supraliminal and subliminal emotional priming’s effects are different significantly too, and it makes subject judge faster under subliminal emotional priming effect.(3)Different emotional priming has different effect on implicit occupation-gender stereotype’s activation. When it is from supraliminal emotional priming effect, positive emotion increases significantly the implicit occupation-gender stereotype’s activation than negative emotion. When it is from subliminal emotional priming effect, negative emotion increases the implicit occupation-gender stereotype’s activation than positive emotion, but the difference does not reach significant levels.(4)Mood regulates the relationship between implicit and explicit occupation-gender stereotypes. There is more implicit and explicit stereotype correspondence in the partial positive emotion than in the partial negative emotion, when it is supraliminal emotional priming effect. There is not implicit and explicit stereotype correspondence significant between the partial positive emotion and the partial negative emotion, when it is subliminal emotional priming effect.(5)The effective time of the emotion is an important factor that must be considered and resolved, when we study the effect of mood on the relationship between implicit attitude and explicit attitude. In addition to, the adjustment of mood on implicit-explicit attitude relation has been affected by relation between itself.