Development of Gender Typicality and Felt Pressure in European French and North African French Adolescents.

Trajectories of gender identity were examined from Grade 6 (Mage  = 11.9 years) to Grade 9 in European French (n = 570) and North African French (n = 534) adolescents, and gender and ethnic group differences were assessed in these trajectories. In Grade 6, boys of both ethnic groups reported higher levels of gender typicality and felt pressure for gender conformity than girls. European French girls and boys and North African French girls reported decreasing gender typicality from Grade 6 to Grade 9, whereas North African French boys did not change. Felt pressure decreased among girls, did not change in European French boys, and increased in North African French boys. Ethnic and gender differences in gender identity development are discussed.

Travelers' Actual and Subjective Knowledge about Risk for Ebola Virus Disease.

To determine travelers' actual and subjective knowledge about risk for Ebola virus disease, we surveyed travelers from France. Actual knowledge did not prevent irrational perceptions or promote safe behavior. Rather, readiness to adopt protective behavior depended on subjective knowledge and overconfidence in ability to self-protect.

Negative Aging Stereotypes Disrupt both the Selection and Execution of Strategies in Older Adults.

BACKGROUND: Age-based cognitive deficits are exacerbated by stereotype threat effects (i.e., the threat of being judged as cognitively incapable due to aging). We tested whether age-based stereotype threat effects can occur via impair- ing older adults' ability to select the best strategy and/or to execute strategies efficiently. METHODS: Older adults (age range: 64.3-89.5 years) were randomly assigned to a stereotype threat or control condition before taking an episodic memory task. They encoded pairs of concrete words and of abstract words, with either a repetition or an imagery strategy, and then took a cued-recall task. Whereas participants in experiment 1 could choose between these two strategies, those of experiment 2 were forced to use either the repetition or the imagery strategy. RESULTS: Our findings showed that age-based stereotype threat disrupts both the selection and execution of the most efficient, but also most resource-demanding, imagery strategy, and that these stereotype threat effects were stronger on concrete words. CONCLUSION: Our findings have important implications to further understand age-based (and other) stereotype threat effects, and how noncognitive factors modulate age-related changes in human cognition.

Aging Stereotypes Must be Taken Into Account for the Diagnosis of Prodromal and Early Alzheimer Disease.

Because of a dramatic increase of older people worldwide, screening for prodromal state of Alzheimer disease (AD) is a major societal challenge. Many individuals diagnosed with prodromal AD, do not convert to AD, some remaining stable and others reversing back to normal. We argue that an important source of this overdiagnosis comes from negative aging stereotypes (eg, the culturally shared beliefs that aging inescapably causes severe cognitive decline and diseases). Many laboratory studies show that such stereotypes impair memory performance in healthy older adults, producing inflated age differences. Research is needed to examine how aging stereotypes implicitly permeate neuropsychological testing and contribute to false positives.

On the power of autobiographical memories: from threat and challenge appraisals to actual behaviour.

Autobiographical memories are a major feature of mental life in humans. However, research on the influence of autobiographical recall on actual behaviour is scarce. We predicted and found that general memories of failure and specific memories of success resulted in worse performance than general memories of success and specific memories of failure. This performance pattern was mediated by task appraisal, suggesting that autobiographical memories (of failure and success) impact performance by shaping the perception of the upcoming task. Combined with the fact that these effects occurred even when the content of autobiographical memories was unrelated to the upcoming task, the present research represents an important step forward in understanding how autobiographical recall influences actual behaviour.

Age-based stereotype threat effects on dynamic balance in healthy older adults.

Introduction: Stereotype threat can lead older adults to perceive their experiences in a biased manner, giving rise to interfering thoughts and negative emotions that generate stress and anxiety. Negative beliefs about aging may serve as an additional factor that increases the need for attentional demand, potentially resulting in a performance level below their actual capabilities. In the present study, we asked whether negative aging stereotypes influence a dynamic balance task and explored the means to counteract them in healthy elderly participants. Methods: The performance of balance was compared in two groups of participants aged 65 to 75 years (n = 22) under stereotype threat or reduced-threat situation. Balance abilities were tested under dynamic conditions, requiring participants to maintain balance on a moving platform and using a gradient of difficulty (with eyes open or closed, without or with foam). Postural performance was evaluated by means of posturographic evaluation of the center of pressure displacement and motion analysis. Additionally, we investigated the effects of stereotype threat on a preferred walking speed task and on the Timed Up and Go (TUG) test. Results: Participants under stereotype threat showed poorer balance, particularly in challenging conditions (eyes closed, on foam), with less effective body segments stabilization. Their postural stabilization on foam was worse compared to a solid surface. Conversely, those in the reduced threat condition maintained better body segment stabilization across all conditions, indicating consistent postural control regardless of the presence of foam. Stereotype threat did not affect preferred walking speed or the time to complete the "Time Up and Go" test. Discussion-conclusion: This study provides the first description of age-based stereotype threat effects on a dynamic balance task and how to counteract them in healthy older adults. We suggest that the decrease in postural performance observed in participants exposed to stereotype threat can be attributed to a split in attentional focus between negative intrusive thoughts and the attention needed for maintaining balance. These findings open new perspectives on how to overcome negative expectations when evaluating and training physical abilities, thereby contributing to fall prevention among older adults.

Corrigendum: The impact of pedagogical agents' gender on academic learning: a systematic review.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/frai.2022.862997.].

Stereotype threat strengthens automatic recall and undermines controlled processes in older adults.

The threat of being judged stereotypically (stereotype threat) may impair memory performance in older adults, thereby producing inflated age differences in memory tasks. However, the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat in older adults or other stigmatized groups remain poorly understood. Here, we offer evidence that stereotype threat consumes working memory resources in older adults. More important, using a process-dissociation procedure, we found, for the first time, that stereotype threat undermines the controlled use of memory and simultaneously intensifies automatic response tendencies. These findings indicate that competing models of stereotype threat are actually compatible and offer further reasons for researchers and practitioners to pay special attention to age-related stereotypes during standardized neuropsychological testing.

Toward a New Approach to Investigate the Role of Working Memory in Stereotype Threat Effects.

Stereotype threat arises when the activation of negative stereotypes about a group impairs performance of stigmatized individuals on stereotype relevant tasks. There is ample evidence that stereotype threat leads to performance detriments by consuming executive resources. Several studies indeed showed that working memory (WM) mediates stereotype threat effects among young adults. More recently, researchers have sought to understand whether the same mechanisms underlie age-based stereotype threat, but findings are mixed regarding the role of WM and some authors rather favor a motivational explanation based on regulatory fit. The present review critically appraises the empirical support for distinct forms of stereotype threat effects mediated by distinct mechanisms. We propose a novel approach based on one of the most recent WM models, the time-based resource sharing model, to evaluate the impact of stereotype threat on attentional resources in WM among both young and older adults.

The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review.

Virtual learning environments often use virtual characters to facilitate and improve the learning process. These characters, known as pedagogical agents, can take on different roles, such as tutors or companions. Research has highlighted the importance of various characteristics of virtual agents, including their voice or non-verbal behaviors. Little attention has been paid to the gender-specific design of pedagogical agents, although gender has an important influence on the educational process. In this article, we perform an extensive review of the literature regarding the impact of the gender of pedagogical agents on academic outcomes. Based on a detailed review of 59 articles, we analyze the influence of pedagogical agents' gender on students' academic self-evaluations and achievements to answer the following questions: (1) Do students perceive virtual agents differently depending on their own gender and the gender of the agent? (2) Does the gender of pedagogical agents influence students' academic performance and self-evaluations? (3) Are there tasks or academic situations to which a male virtual agent is better suited than a female virtual agent, and vice versa, according to empirical evidence? (4) How do a virtual agent's pedagogical roles impact these results? (5) How do a virtual agent's appearance and interactive capacities impact these results? (6) Are androgynous virtual agents a potential solution to combatting gender stereotypes? This review provides important insight to researchers on how to approach gender when designing pedagogical agents in virtual learning environments.

Cultural Differences in Susceptibility to Stereotype Threat: France versus India.

OBJECTIVES: Negative aging stereotypes make older adults perform below their true potential in a number of cognitive domains. This phenomenon, known as Age-Based Stereotype Threat, is currently viewed as a powerful factor contributing to an overestimation of cognitive decline in normal aging. However, age-based stereotype threat has been investigated almost exclusively in Western countries. Whether this phenomenon is universal or culture-specific is unknown. METHOD: Here, we first ran a pilot study (N = 106) in which we assessed French and Indian participants' attitudes towards aging. Then, we assessed stereotype threat effects on arithmetic problem-solving performance and strategies in French and Indian older adults (N = 104). RESULTS: We found that French older adults have more negative implicit attitudes towards aging than Indian older adults. We also found that culture modulates age-based stereotype threat effects. Whereas French older adults experienced stereotype threat on both selection and execution of strategies on all arithmetic problems, Indian older adults experienced this threat only in their strategy selection on harder problems. Most interestingly, cultural differences emerged on arithmetic problems under stereotype threat condition, where otherwise no cultural differences were found in the control condition. DISCUSSION: Our findings have important implications for understanding how cultural contexts change aging effects on human cognition and age-related difference in cognitive performance.

Socio-Emotional Competencies and School Performance in Adolescence: What Role for School Adjustment?

There is growing evidence in the literature of positive relationships between socio-emotional competencies and school performance. Several hypotheses have been used to explain how these variables may be related to school performance. In this paper, we explored the role of various school adjustment variables in the relationship between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades, using a weighted network approach. This network approach allowed us to analyze the structure of interrelations between each variable, pointing to both central and mediatory school and socio-emotional variables within the network. Self-reported data from around 3,400 French vocational high school students were examined. This data included a set of interpersonal socio-emotional competencies (cognitive and affective empathy, socio-emotional behaviors and collective orientation), school adjustment measures (adaptation to the institution, school anxiety, self-regulation at school, and self-perceived competence at school) as well as grades in mathematics and French language. The results showed that self-regulation at school weighted the most strongly on the whole network, and was the most important mediatory pathway. More specifically, self-regulation mediated the relationships between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades.

Phantom behavioral assimilation effects: systematic biases in social comparison choice studies.

Consistent with social comparison theory (SCT), Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, and Kuyper (1999) and Huguet, Dumas, Monteil, and Genestoux (2001) found that students tended to choose comparison targets who slightly outperformed them (i.e., upward comparison choices), and this had a beneficial effect on subsequent performance--a behavioral assimilation effect (BAE). We show (Studies 1 and 2) that this apparent BAE is due, in part, to uncontrolled measurement error in pretest achievement. However, using simulated data (Study 3), these phantom BAEs were eliminated with latent-variable models with multiple indicators. In Studies 4 and 5, latent-variable models were applied to the Blanton et al. and Huguet et al. data, resulting in substantially smaller but still significantly positive BAEs. More generally in personality research based on correlational data, failure to control measurement error in pretest/background variables will positively bias the apparent effects of personality variables of interest, but widely applicable approaches demonstrated here can correct for these biases.

When and how stereotype threat influences older adults' arithmetic performance: Insight from a strategy approach.

In 3 experiments, we investigated how age-related differences in cognitive performance are exacerbated by age-based stereotype threat. We adopted a strategy approach and investigated a domain, namely arithmetic, where age-related differences in participants' performance are either nonexistent or very small and where effects of age-based stereotype threat have never been investigated. In 2 types of tasks (problem verification in Experiment 1 and computational estimation in Experiments 2 and 3), we found that age-based stereotype threat led older adults to obtain poorer performance, to adopt less systematically and less often the better strategy on each problem, to repeat the same strategy across trials even when it was inappropriate, and to execute available strategies more poorly. We also found that poorer strategy use mediated threat effects and that individual differences in processing resources moderated individuals' sensitivity to effects of stereotype threat. Our results establish that age-based stereotype threat effects occur in a wide variety of cognitive domains and tasks and are independent of pre-experimental differences in young and older adults' performance. They deepen our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying age-based, and other stereotype threat effects. They also document how domain-general and domain-specific processing resources moderate individual differences in age-based stereotype threat effects. Our findings have important implications to improve our understanding of how and when age-based (and other) stereotype threat effects occur, and, more generally, how psychosocial factors modulate age-related changes in human cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing.

As life expectancy increases, aging has become a major health challenge, resulting in a huge effort to better discriminate between normal and pathological cognitive decline. It is thus essential that cognitive tests and their administration are as fair as possible. However, an important source of bias during cognitive testing comes from negative aging stereotypes that can impair the memory performance of older adults and inflate age differences on cognitive tasks. The fear of confirming negative aging stereotypes creates an extra pressure among older adults which interferes with their intellectual functioning and leads them to perform below their true abilities. Here, we present a protocol that highlights simple but efficient interventions to alleviate this age-based stereotype threat effect. The first study showed that simply informing older participants about the presence of younger participants (threat condition) led older adults to underperform on a standardized memory test compared with younger participants, and that this performance difference was eliminated when the test was presented as age-fair (reduced-threat condition). The second study replicated these findings on short cognitive tests used to screen for predementia in clinical settings and showed that teaching older adults about stereotype threat inoculated them against its effects. These results provide useful recommendations about how to improve older adults' memory assessment both in Iab studies and in clinical settings.

Clarifying the role of social comparison in the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE): an integrative study.

It has been speculated that the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE; the negative impact of highly selective academic settings on academic self-concept) is a consequence of invidious social comparisons experienced in higher ability schools. However, the direct role of such comparisons for the BFLPE has not heretofore been documented. The present study comprises the first evidence that the BFLPE (a) is eliminated after controlling for students' invidious comparisons with their class and (b) coexists with the assimilative and contrastive effects of upward social comparison choices on academic self-concept. These results increase understanding of the BFLPE and offer support for integrative approaches of social comparison (selective accessibility and interpretation comparison models) in a natural setting. They also lend support for the distinction between forced and deliberate social comparisons and the usefulness of distinguishing between absolute and relative comparison-level choice in self-assessment.

Committees with implicit biases promote fewer women when they do not believe gender bias exists.

Whether gender bias contributes to women's under-representation in scientific fields is still controversial. Past research is limited by relying on explicit questionnaire ratings in mock-hiring scenarios, thereby ignoring the potential role of implicit gender bias in the real world. We examine the interactive effect of explicit and implicit gender biases on promotion decisions made by scientific evaluation committees representing the whole scientific spectrum in the course of an annual nationwide competition for elite research positions. Findings reveal that committees with strong implicit gender biases promoted fewer women at year 2 (when committees were not reminded of the study) relative to year 1 (when the study was announced) if those committees did not explicitly believe that external barriers hold women back. When committees believed that women face external barriers, implicit biases did not predict selecting more men over women. This finding highlights the importance of educating evaluative committees about gender biases.

Does social context impact metacognition? Evidence from stereotype threat in a visual search task.

While recent studies have emphasized the role of metacognitive judgments in social interactions, whether social context might reciprocally impact individuals' metacognition remains an open question. It has been proposed that such might be the case in situations involving stereotype threat. Here, we provide the first empirical test of this hypothesis. Using a visual search task, we asked participants, on a trial-by-trial basis, to monitor the unfolding and accuracy of their search processes, and we developed a computational model to measure the accuracy of their metacognition. Results indicated that stereotype threat enhanced metacognitive monitoring of both outcomes and processes. Our study thus shows that social context can actually affect metacognition.

Ageing stereotypes and prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AGING): study protocol for an ongoing randomised clinical study.

INTRODUCTION: The number of older people diagnosed with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), the prodromal state of Alzheimer's disease (AD), is increasing worldwide. However, some patients with aMCI never convert to the AD type of dementia, with some remaining stable and others reverting to normal. This overdiagnosis bias has been largely overlooked and gone unexplained. There is ample evidence in the laboratory that negative ageing stereotypes (eg, the culturally shared belief that ageing inescapably causes severe cognitive decline) contribute to the deteriorating cognitive performances of healthy older adults, leading them to perform below their true abilities. The study described here is intended to test for the first time whether such stereotypes also impair patients' cognitive performances during neuropsychological examinations in memory clinics, resulting in overdiagnosis of aMCI. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The ongoing study is a 4-year randomised clinical trial comparing patients' physiological stress and cognitive performances during neuropsychological testing in memory clinics. A total of 260 patients attending their first cognitive evaluation will be randomised to either a standard condition of test administration, assumed here to implicitly activate negative ageing stereotypes or a reduced-threat instruction condition designed to alleviate the anxiety arising from these stereotypes. Both groups will be tested with the same test battery and stress biomarkers. For 30 patients diagnosed with aMCI in each group (n=60), biomarkers of neurodegeneration and amyloidopathy will be used to distinguish between aMCI with normal versus abnormal AD biomarkers. A 9-month follow-up will be performed on all patients to identify those whose cognitive performances remain stable, deteriorate or improve. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This protocol has been approved by the French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety and the Sud-Est I French Ethics Committee (2017-A00946-47). Results will be published in peer-reviewed journals. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT03138018.

In search of the big fish: investigating the coexistence of the big-fish-little-pond effect with the positive effects of upward comparisons.

Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, and Kuyper (1999) and Huguet, Dumas, Monteil, and Genestoux (2001) found that children nominated a social comparison target who slightly outperformed them in class with a beneficial effect on course grades - an assimilation effect, but with no effects on self-evaluation. However, big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) research has shown that attending a high-ability school has a negative effect on academic self-concept--a contrast effect. To resolve this apparent conflict, the present investigation (1) tested the BFLPE in the Netherlands and France, using nationally representative samples (Study 1) and (2) further analysed (using more sophisticated analyses) the Dutch (Blanton et al.) study (Study 2) and the French (Huguet et al.) study including new French data (Study 3), to examine whether the BFLPE coexisted with, or was moderated by, the beneficial impact of upward comparisons. In support of the BFLPE, all studies found the negative effects of school- or class-average ability on self-evaluation, demonstrating that these assimilation and contrast effects can coexist.