Older Adults' Emotion Recognition Ability Is Unaffected by Stereotype Threat.

Lianne Atkinson,Jamin Halberstadt,Janice E. Murray

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.605724

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Reminding an individual of negative stereotypes about a group to which they belong can lead to concerns about confirming these negative stereotypes, and, in turn, to performance deficits on stereotype-relevant tasks (Steele and Aronson, 1995; Lamont et al, 2015; Spencer et al, 2016)
When emotion recognition was framed as a task that assesses cognitive ability – believed to decline with age – older participants reported heightened levels of stereotype threat, compared to the control condition and social condition
A secondary finding was that, contrary to many previous studies and meta-analyses (Ruffman et al, 2008), older adults were competent as young adults at recognising negative emotions and better at recognising positive emotions

Summary

Introduction

Reminding an individual of negative stereotypes about a group to which they belong can lead to concerns about confirming these negative stereotypes, and, in turn, to performance deficits on stereotype-relevant tasks (Steele and Aronson, 1995; Lamont et al, 2015; Spencer et al, 2016). Eliciting negative stereotypes about African Americans’ academic abilities leads to underperformance on academic tests (Nguyen and Ryan, 2008; Spencer et al, 2016). This well-documented phenomenon is known as stereotype threat. One group frequently subject to prejudice and age-related stereotypes is older adults. Held negative attitudes and stereotypes include the beliefs that attractiveness declines with age, that older adults are less competent than young adults, that older adults lack creativity, and that older adults

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