People use facial appearance to infer the social attributes of others. A primary indicator of facial attractiveness is prototypicality (the proximity of an object to its categorical central tendency); faces and objects closer to the central tendency are judged as more attractive. Perceptual fluency theory suggests that cognitive processing speed directly generates positive affect. This dissertation examined the relationships among attractiveness, prototypicality, and affective response in faces and non-face objects across adult and 8-year-old participants using a reaction time (RT) paradigm. RT predicted positive affect and disgust responses to facial stimuli. Of particular note are the series of complementary findings suggesting that reaction to unattractive faces may be both quantitatively (i.e., longer RT latencies) and qualitatively (i.e., judged to be less typical) different from high and medium attractive faces. These findings may help explain how appearance-based stereotypes are formed and maintained. / text

In the age of multi-literacies, contemporary theories and devices are required to decipher increasingly complicated challenges which are presented by the digital technological revolution. Some of the existing approaches and frameworks of could inspire us but are not well equipped to address the complexities and multi-perspectives of the eccentric challenges that scholars face on diverse issues. Therefore, I present the critical semiotic order theory (CSOT) as a new eclectic theory to analyze discourse and moving and still images critically, semiotically and using systematic orders simultaneously.The theory has four hypotheses: 1) the positive and negative order hypothesis; 2) the zero value order hypothesis; 3) the chaos order hypothesis; 4) the semiotic indices order hypothesis. The theory was applied to three movies, and was successful in unearthing numerous perceptions and some were microscopic semiotic communicative indices and related them to polycentric Occidental ideologies.Hollywood has made over a thousand movies negatively stereotyping (NS) Arab/Muslim identities and voices (AMIVs) and the images in the vast majority are demeaning (Shaheen, 2009: 2). This research sets to find out whether the misconstruction of Arab/Muslim identities and voices (AMIVs) in three Hollywood movies are ordered, patterned, systematic, and related to ideologies and agendas of polycentric Western individuals, agencies, institutions and governments.The three movies showcase dozens of discursive microscopic critical semiotic orders and patterns of NS of AMIVs in discourse and still and moving image such as being: angry, dangerous, dirty, primitive, uncivilized, dishonest, cowards, fanatics, slaves, extremists, savages, liars, sorceress, killers, terrorists, mad dogs, child terrorists, suicide bombers, etc. The racism touches Arab/Muslims' (A/Ms) characteristics, personalities, races, cultures, traditions, histories, stories, folklores, costumes, images, etc.The analysis showed that there was a systematic pattern and order of NS of AMIVs within and across the three movies, and the NS is related to ideologies and agendas of polycentric Western individuals, agencies, institutions and governments for socio-cultural, socio-economic and socio-political investments in a vast complex web that some of it can go to hundreds of years in making. Nowadays, NS of AMIVs is done by many Westerners for various ideological agendas and investments, and they have appointed themselves as judge, jury and prosecutor.

The purpose of this study is to see a display on how family, gender and sexuality are produced in four same-sex parents’ stories about their children’s pre-school start. The question formulations that have been used were aimed to find out what expectations and concerns parents may have on the pre-school organization, if the parents have any saying regarding the organization, if the pre-school have worked with equality and how they have been treated as a family. The method used is a qualitative study based on interviews. Four lesbian women have been interviewed on their experiences of their children’s pre-school start and after finishing the interviews the content has been analyzed from different viewpoints found in the material. To back this study up theories as heteronormativity and stereotyping in general have been used. Heteronormativity is based on beliefs related to gender and sexuality. Even stereotyping is related to gender and sexuality but explains more an act performed, while heteronormativity is something prevailing. The conclusions reached in this study are that pre-schools are strongly characterized by heteronormativity, there are small ambitions of change of the organisation at the pre-school and the small changes that happen are moving forward slowly. The knowledge of rainbow families is low and the pre-school does not consider these questions before children from rainbow families start at their school. The change should occur before children from rainbow families start at the pre-school since children from other types of families need to meet this kind of questions in the organization. As long as the pre-school does not work with normative questions, children at pre-school will grow into heteronormative notions of family, gender and sexuality. As the pre-school work today, the children from rainbow families will keep on being invisible in the pre-school organization.

<p>Research indicates that the advancement of women into top management positions is steadily increasing. However, it seems as if gender divisions in the workforce do not encourage equal opportunities for women in the labor sector. In the world of sport, gender equity has been promoted with some progress. However, this progress, both globally and in South Africa, is still limited both quantitatively and qualitatively. There has been very little research on the experiences of women in leadership positions, specifically in the field of sport. This study explored the experiences of female sports administrators in the workplace. This study employed a qualitative research methodology. Purposive sampling was used to select suitable candidates in the field of sport and recreation in the Western Cape, South Africa. Data was collected by using semi-structured interviews and data was analysed using thematic analysis. Results indicate that participants in this study experience gender bias in the workplace in terms of differential treatment, organizational fit and harassment and intimidation. Conclusions and recommendations are also offered.</p>

The suppression of unwanted thoughts is an effortful process. An ironic effect of this process is that the unwanted thoughts can become hyper-accessibility after a period of their suppression, known as “post-suppression rebound”. In the present study the impact of providing energy (through a glucose drink) on post-suppression rebound was investigated. One hundred and twenty participants participated in the main study, and another 30 participants served as a baseline group. Half of the participants in the main study were given a drink containing glucose and the other half was given a placebo drink containing an artificial sweetener. All participants wrote a passage about a “day in the life” of a gay male, with half the participants directed to avoid using stereotypes. A subsequent lexical decision task measured activation of stereotypes. Finally, a measure of prejudice was given to account for individual differences. Neither the direction to avoid using stereotypes nor the glucose resulted in lower stereotypicality of the “day in life” passages. Furthermore, response times during the lexical decision task did not differ between any of the main conditions or the baseline condition. However, the combination of both glucose and directed suppression did result in more positive passages, suggesting that the combination assists in reducing negative stereotype usage. Results are discussed in terms of stereotype usage and suppression and prejudice level.

Statistics show that boys perform better in mathematics tests than girls. In order to make a refined assessment of the magnitude of gender differences in mathematics performance, a study was made of one thousand 16+ mathematics scripts to find the precise topics on which girls and boys differ significantly in performance. These concepts were found to be concerned with scale or ratio, spatial problems, space-time relationships and probability questions. Differences were found in performance between girls and boys at each ten-percentile level through the ability range. A longitudinal study also revealed differences in mathematics 'performance through the years of secondary education. There is no convincing evidence that the discrepancy can be accounted for by innate or genetic reasons. Intervention programmes have been found to improve the performance of girls in the weak areas of spatial awareness, proportionality and problem solving. In addition, a study was made of gender attitudes towards mathematics. Ten secondary schools were surveyed and the results revealed a marked decrease in the attitudes of third and fourth form girls. During these difficult adolescent years girls and boys are susceptible to strong internal and external pressures. Corresponding differences were also found across the ability range. These social pressures are concerned with teacher influence, social interaction, type of grouping, sex stereotyping, choices, teaching materials and careers advice.

Aim: The aim of the study is to investigate the impact of national culture on female’s career advancement and different barriers that females may confront in University of Gävle and GuizhouUniversity   Method: Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in the current study. Qualitative data is collected by sixteen interviews including ten participants from University of Gävle and six participants from GuizhouUniversity. And the quantitative data is collected by one hundred questionnaires in the two universities.   Result and Conclusions: The study finds out that Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions: power distance, collectivism vs. individualism, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity vs. femininity, long-term orientation vs. short-term orientation and indulgence vs. restraint could affect female’s career advancement in varying degree in which power distance and masculinity vs. femininity differentiate the two universities to a large extent. Moreover, the study shows gender stereotyping, lack of networking, and lack of mentorship are most obvious barriers for female’s career advancement while the impact of glass ceiling, opportunities and self-confidence is relatively.   Suggestion for further studies: Future studies could take more cultural models into consideration. Bigger samples in two countries should be collected to view a whole picture of female’s situation in Swedish and Chinese tertiary education field.   Contribution of the thesis: The model of relationship between national culture and female’s career advancement provides a framework for the further studies relating to female’s under-representation in tertiary field. Barriers identified by the authors remind the universities to improve their organizational management.

[Truncated abstract] The anxiety-assimilation hypothesis (Wilder, 1993) and the capacity constraint plus control motivation model (Fiske & Morling, 1996) predict that anxiety causes people to form more stereotypic impressions of others. Affect-as-information (Schwarz & Clore, 1983) and affect-priming (Bower, 1991) theories predict that anxiety causes people to form affect-congruent (i.e., more threatening) impressions of others. A novel research paradigm was used in Experiment 1 to separate the predictions of these two classes of theories, recognizing that their predictions were not mutually exclusive. Experiment 1 found that anxious persons formed more threatening, but not more stereotypic, impressions of a target person. This result replicated in Experiment 2, with a different population and a different anxiety manipulation. In addition, Experiment 2 found that the anxiety-congruent bias in impression formation was limited to participants? ratings of traits that corresponded to the information presented about the target. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 were taken as support for an affect-priming rather than affect-as-information account of the effect of anxiety on impression formation. Experiments 3 and 4 investigated anxiety effects on encoding and recall that underlie affect-priming explanation of affect-congruent impression judgment biases. Experiment 3 found that anxious participants spent more time encoding non-stereotypic information and recalled less stereotypic information than non-anxious participants. In Experiment 4 anxious participants again recalled less stereotypic information. This study also found that anxious participants? recall and impression judgments were affect-congruent. ... As predicted by the modified affect-as-information theory, the affect-attribution manipulation left participants? anxiety levels unaltered but it did attenuate the anxiety-congruent impression bias. In addition, anxious participants in this study recalled less stereotypic than non-stereotypic information. The findings of this thesis raised several new questions and theoretical challenges. The new experimental paradigms that were used to examine the questions in this thesis will also allow the examination of the interplay of stereotypes and valence in judgments in future research for persons in affective states other than anxiety. Such research would allow for the continued revision and development of theories of affect and social cognition.

This thesis explores some of the social factors that may affect individuals as they age. A lifespan developmental perspective is employed in investigating the effects of societal aging stereotypes on will-to-live and risk-taking skills. Results suggest negative aging stereotypes may have deleterious effects on the elderly, but not young individuals in terms of will-to-live, but have no effect on risk-taking abilities. Furthermore, a cross-cultural analysis of Americans and Japanese reveals robust differences in self-concept between countries, which in turn partially mediate the effects of culture and age on control strategies. It appears culture and age may play important roles in determining individuals’ self-concept, motivation, and regulation of behavior. The first part of Study 1 examined whether stereotypes of aging contribute to decisions the elderly make about when to die. Elderly and young participants (n = 64) were subliminally primed with either negative or positive stereotypes of old age using a computer, and then responded to hypothetical medical situations involving potentially fatal illnesses. Consistent with my prediction, the aged participants primed with negative stereotypes tended to refuse life-prolonging interventions, whereas those primed with positive age stereotypes tended to accept the interventions. This priming effect did not emerge among the young participants for whom the stereotypes were less relevant. The results suggest that sociallytransmitted negative stereotypes of aging can weaken elderly will-to-live, or at the very least, willingness to pursue medical intervention. The second part of Study 1 examined whether the older adults demonstrate similar risk-taking skills to the younger adults, and whether this ability is preserved, even after exposure to age stereotypes. Sixteen young and 16 older participants were tested on a risk-taking decision task following exposure to subliminal aging stereotypes. In all conditions, both the old and young participants systematically and equivalently increased their willingness to take risks as risk level decreased. Furthermore, response times were an inverted U shape curve with slower response times recorded at the medium risk level and faster times as risk levels shifted up or down. The findings suggest the ability to make decisions based on risk level is maintained into old age. Study 2 investigated results reported by a number of studies finding that primary control remains stable in old age, is lower in Asian countries, and that secondary control increases in old age and is higher in Asian countries. I examined whether these patterns may be due to the mediating influence of an interdependent self-concept. In a sample of 557 young and older adults in Japan and the United States, primary and secondary control, age, and interdependence were studied. I found that interdependence partially mediated the influence of culture on secondary control and interdependence partially mediated the influence of age on both primary and secondary control. Findings suggest that interdependence is an important factor that should be considered in trying to understand the determinants of control crossculturally and developmentally.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1980. / "A research report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ..."