Atkinson Lianne, Murray Janice E, Halberstadt Jamin
Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jan 7;11:605724. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.605724. eCollection 2020.
Eliciting negative stereotypes about ageing commonly results in worse performance on many physical, memory, and cognitive tasks in adults aged over 65. The current studies explored the potential effect of this "stereotype threat" phenomenon on older adults' emotion recognition, a cognitive ability that has been demonstrated to decline with age. In Study 1, stereotypes about emotion recognition ability across the lifespan were established. In Study 2, these stereotypes were utilised in a stereotype threat manipulation that framed an emotion recognition task as assessing either cognitive ability (stereotypically believed to worsen with age), social ability (believed to be stable across lifespan), or general abilities (control). Participants then completed an emotion recognition task in which they labelled dynamic expressions of negative and positive emotions. Self-reported threat concerns were also measured. Framing an emotion recognition task as assessing cognitive ability significantly heightened older adults' (but not younger adults') reports of stereotype threat concerns. Despite this, older adults' emotion recognition performance was unaffected. Unlike other cognitive abilities, recognising facially expressed emotions may be unaffected by stereotype threat, possibly because emotion recognition is automatic, making it less susceptible to the cognitive load that stereotype threat produces.
引发关于衰老的负面刻板印象通常会导致65岁以上成年人在许多身体、记忆和认知任务上表现更差。当前的研究探讨了这种“刻板印象威胁”现象对老年人情绪识别的潜在影响，情绪识别是一种已被证明会随着年龄增长而下降的认知能力。在研究1中，确立了关于整个生命周期情绪识别能力的刻板印象。在研究2中，这些刻板印象被用于一种刻板印象威胁操纵中，即将一项情绪识别任务设定为评估认知能力（通常认为会随着年龄增长而变差）、社交能力（认为在整个生命周期中保持稳定）或一般能力（对照组）。参与者随后完成了一项情绪识别任务，在该任务中他们对负面和正面情绪的动态表情进行标注。还测量了自我报告的威胁担忧。将情绪识别任务设定为评估认知能力显著提高了老年人（而非年轻人）对刻板印象威胁担忧的报告。尽管如此，老年人的情绪识别表现并未受到影响。与其他认知能力不同，识别面部表情的情绪可能不受刻板印象威胁的影响，这可能是因为情绪识别是自动的，使其较不易受到刻板印象威胁所产生的认知负荷的影响。
