Department of Psychology, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2007 Mar;2(1):12-9. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsl041.
Recent negative focus on women's academic abilities has fueled disputes over gender disparities in the sciences. The controversy derives, in part, from women's relatively poorer performance in aptitude tests, many of which require skills of spatial reasoning. We used functional magnetic imaging to examine the neural structure underlying shifts in women's performance of a spatial reasoning task induced by positive and negative stereotypes. Three groups of participants performed a task involving imagined rotations of the self. Prior to scanning, the positive stereotype group was exposed to a false but plausible stereotype of women's superior perspective-taking abilities; the negative stereotype group was exposed to the pervasive stereotype that men outperform women on spatial tasks; and the control group received neutral information. The significantly poorer performance we found in the negative stereotype group corresponded to increased activation in brain regions associated with increased emotional load. In contrast, the significantly improved performance we found in the positive stereotype group was associated with increased activation in visual processing areas and, to a lesser degree, complex working memory processes. These findings suggest that stereotype messages affect the brain selectively, with positive messages producing relatively more efficient neural strategies than negative messages.
最近对女性学术能力的负面关注加剧了科学界性别差异的争议。这一争议部分源于女性在能力倾向测试中的表现相对较差，这些测试中有许多都需要空间推理技能。我们使用功能磁共振成像来研究女性在空间推理任务中表现的变化所涉及的神经结构，这种变化是由积极和消极的刻板印象引起的。三组参与者完成了一项涉及自我想象旋转的任务。在扫描之前，积极刻板印象组接触到了一个关于女性具有优越的换位思考能力的虚假但合理的刻板印象；消极刻板印象组接触到了一种普遍的刻板印象，即男性在空间任务上优于女性；对照组则收到了中性信息。我们发现消极刻板印象组的表现明显较差，这与与情绪负荷增加相关的大脑区域的激活增加相对应。相比之下，我们发现积极刻板印象组的表现明显提高，这与视觉处理区域的激活增加有关，在较小程度上与复杂的工作记忆过程有关。这些发现表明，刻板印象信息会选择性地影响大脑，积极的信息比消极的信息产生相对更有效的神经策略。
