De récents travaux soulignent qu’en France, les jeunes issus de l’immigration nord-africainesont moins nombreux à avoir le baccalauréat que les autres. Cette thèse défend l’idée généraleque cette moindre réussite académique peut être due, du moins en partie, à une moindrequalité des apprentissages scolaires. Dans la lignée des travaux de Steele et Aronson (1995)sur le phénomène de menace du stéréotype, l’objectif principal de cette thèse est d’examinerdans quelle mesure les stéréotypes négatifs associés aux capacités d’apprentissage des enfantsd’origine nord-africaine peuvent avoir des effets délétères sur la qualité de leursapprentissages scolaires. Il s’agit également, dans une visée développementale, d’enrichir lesconnaissances en psychologie sociale sur l’âge d’apparition de l’effet de menace dustéréotype chez les enfants. Enfin, dans un souci de validité écologique, ce travail a aussi pourobjectif de tester si les effets de menace du stéréotype se retrouvent en contexte scolaire réel.Sur cette base, cinq études expérimentales ayant toutes été réalisées en contexte réel de classesont présentées, impliquant près de 1 000 élèves scolarisés du CP au CM2. En accord avecnos hypothèses, les résultats obtenus permettent de conclure que les premiers apprentissagesscolaires des enfants français issus de l’immigration nord-africaine sont, dès leur plus jeuneâge, diminués par un effet de menace du stéréotype sur les apprentissages. En outre, lesrésultats mettent en évidence l’implication de l’identité sociale des enfants, et des effets desidentités ethniques et de genre qui sont favorables aux filles d’origine nord-africaine maisdéfavorables à leurs pairs masculins. Globalement, ces résultats soutiennent une explicationsocio-cognitive plutôt que socio-biologique des différences d’accession au baccalauréat enfonction de l’origine ethnique, et apportent un éclairage nouveau sur les processus impliquésdans la menace du stéréotype. / Recent studies emphasize that young French North-Africans are less likely than others to havea baccalauréat. We argue that this lower success can be due, at least in part, to a lower qualityof school learning. According to Steele and Aronson (1995) and the stereotype threathypothesis, the principal aim of this work was to examine in which extent negativestereotypes about learning abilities of French North African children can decrease quality oflearning. In a developmental perspective, our second goal was to better know when stereotypethreat effect begins to impact children’s learning and performance. Finally, in an ecologicalperspective, our third aim was to test if stereotype threat occurs in real academic setting. Fiveexperiments were conducted in real academic setting among nearly 1 000 students in primaryschool level. As expected, the results showed that stereotype threat affects negatively learningof French North-African children in primary school. In addition, the results highlighted theinfluence of children’s social identity. Ethnic and gender identities effects also appearedshowing a favourable effect for French North-African girls but an unfavourable one for theirmale peers. Overall, these findings support a sociocognitive explanation of French North-Africans inferiority in baccalauréat access, rather than a sociobiological one. Furthermore,these findings support a new understanding of processes implicated in stereotype threat.

Cette thèse a pour objectif l’examen des conséquences de la stigmatisation du surpoids chez les jeunes femmes qui se perçoivent en surpoids (que cette perception soit justifiée ou non) via le phénomène de menace du stéréotype (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Nous proposons que des contextes menaçants, en lien avec les stéréotypes négatifs qui portent sur les comportements alimentaires des personnes en surpoids, peuvent biaiser l’estimation que ces femmes font des aliments et augmenter leur consommation d’aliments réconfortants. Les études expérimentales de ce travail doctoral confirment ces hypothèses : leurs résultats indiquent que plus les femmes pensent avoir un excès de poids, (i) moins elles réussissent à estimer la teneur calorique des aliments et à sélectionner les plats en fonction de leurs valeurs nutritionnelles, et (ii) plus elles consomment d’aliments gras et sucrés. Nous investiguons également le rôle médiateur des émotions (et notamment celui de l’anxiété) ainsi que sur celui de la réduction des ressources disponibles en mémoire de travail dans ces effets. Si nos études ne permettent pas d’affirmer l’implication de mécanismes émotionnels, une de nos études met en cause la diminution des ressources en mémoire de travail.Bien que d’autres études ont déjà fait état des conséquences de la menace du stéréotype lié au surpoids chez les personnes objectivement en surpoids (e.g., Brochu & Dovidio, 2014), les études de cette thèse sont les premières à mettre en évidence les conséquences de ce phénomène chez les femmes qui se perçoivent en surpoids, et à confirmer qu’il est nécessaire de prendre en compte cette variable dans l’étude des conséquences de la stigmatisation du surpoids. / This thesis aims to examine the consequences the stigma of overweight among young women who perceive themselves as overweight (whether this perception is justified or not), via the phenomenon of stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995). We propose that threatening contexts (in which negative stereotypes are about the eating behaviours of overweight people are activated), can (i) bias overweight self-perceived women's nutritional values assessment, and thus lead them to select dishes that are not adapted to their needs, and (ii) increase their consumption of comfort food. The experimental studies of this doctoral work tend to confirm these hypotheses: their results indicate that the more young women think they are overweight, (i) the less successful they are at estimating the calorie content of foods and selecting dishes on the basis of their nutritional values, (ii) the more they consume fatty and sugary foods. We also investigate the roles of emotions (especially anxiety) and working memory resources in these effects. Although our studies do not allow us to assert the involvement of emotional mechanisms, one of our studies underlines the role of a decrease in working memory resources. While other studies have already reported the deleterious consequences of overweight stereotype threat in objectively overweight individuals (e.g., Brochu & Dovidio, 2014), ours are the first to report on the consequences of this phenomenon in overweight self-perceived women, and confirm that weight perception must be taken into account in studies on the negative health consequences associated with weight stigma.

Despite a narrowing trend over the past forty years, the racial academic performance gap between non-Asian-American minority students and European-American students remains an overarching issue in K-12 schooling according to the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis (2017). Du Bois’s (1903) theory of double consciousness is implicated in the performance gap phenomenon. Though not explicitly connected, Steele and Aronson’s 1995 study revealed stereotype threat (STT) to be an empirical explanation of the negative impact of double consciousness. Steele et al.’s study revealed a psycho-social contributor to the racial academic performance gap, STT. STT is characterized by performance suppression caused by the fear of fulfilling a negative stereotype or the fear of being judged based on a negative stereotype attributed to one’s social identity group. The activation of this phenomenon is related to identity threatening cues, a systemic issue laden in the academic environment (Purdie-Vaughns, Steele, Davies, Ditlmann, & Crosby, 2008). To date, over 300 studies have been conducted on STT according to a meta-analysis conducted by Pennington, Heim, Levy, and Larkin (2016). Though certain experimental studies featuring mentoring as a vehicle for shifting stereotype narratives have yielded useful practices for STT reduction (Good et al., 2003), qualitative design, which is seldomly employed in the STT field, may produce an understanding of the phenomenon that is not possible through a deductive approach (Ezzy, 2002; van Kaam, 1966). The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore African-American adolescent student perceptions of the impact that mentoring has on their schooling experiences while under STT conditions. The findings of this study demonstrated that African-American adolescents perceived mentoring to positively impact their schooling experiences and helped them to cope with STT activating cues in the environment. The participants discussed structural aspects of the relationships, personality attributes of the mentor, and specific mentor guidance. Participants also discussed a documented STT intervention that fell outside of the parameters of their mentoring relationships that positively impacted their schooling experiences and abilities to cope with STT cues – affirmations (Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, & Master, 2006; Walton et al., 2012). Recommendations for practice and future research are presented.

Most leaders of healthcare delivery organizations have increased their rate of technological innovation, but some still struggle to keep pace with other industries. The problem addressed in this study was that senior leaders in some rural ambulatory healthcare facilities failed to innovate, even with recent healthcare technological innovations, which could lead to increased medical errors and a loss of efficiency. The purpose of the study was to examine if a relationship exists between the avoidance of technology threats by senior leaders in ambulatory healthcare organizations and the innovation propensity of the organization. Technology threat avoidance theory served as the theoretical basis for this correlational study. The research questions were used to investigate the relationship between technology threat avoidance by senior leaders and the ways avoidance affects an organization's level of technological innovation. Data were collected from 90 respondents via an anonymous online survey, developed from the innovation culture measurement and the COPE measurement, and analyzed using multiple regression and Spearman's correlation. Organizations with senior leaders who actively avoided technology threats had significantly higher innovation propensity (β = .51, p = .001). The analysis also showed that rural healthcare delivery organizations tended to have lower innovation propensity (β = -.18, p = .05). The study social change implications enable the leaders of more health care delivery organizations to actively mitigate technology threats, rather than passively avoiding them. Properly handling these threats could allow management to make more informed decisions about technology implementations and thus increase their ability to provide meaningful, innovative care and to avoid one of the leading causes of death-medical errors.

This thesis examines attentional and cognitive biases for particular facial expressions in delusion-prone and deluded individuals. The exploration of cognitive biases in delusion-prone individuals provides one means of elucidating psychological processes that might be involved in the genesis of delusions. Chapter 1 provides a brief review of the continuum approach to schizophrenia, and outlines recent theoretical conceptualisations of delusions. The study of schizophrenia phenomena at the symptom level has become a popular method of inquiry, given the heterogeneous phenotypic expression of schizophrenia, and the uncertainty surrounding the existence of a core neuropathology. Delusions are one of the most commonly experienced symptoms of schizophrenia, and have traditionally been regarded as fixed, false beliefs that are pathognomonic of an organic disease process. However, recent phenomenological evidence of delusional ideation in the general population has led to the conceptualisation of delusions as multi-dimensional entities, lying at the extreme end of a continuum from normal through to maladaptive beliefs. Recent investigations of the information processing abnormalities in deluded individuals are reviewed in Chapter 2. This strand of research has revealed evidence of various biases in social cognition, particularly in relation to threat-related material, in deluded individuals. These biases are evident in probabilistic reasoning, attribution style, and attention, but there has been relatively little investigation of cognitive aberrations in delusion-prone individuals. In the present thesis, social-cognitive biases were examined in relation to a standard series of faces that included threat-related (anger, fear) and non-threatening (happy, sad) expressions, in both delusion-prone and clinically deluded individuals. Chapters 3 and 4 present the results of behavioural (RT, affect recognition accuracy) and visual scanpath investigations in healthy participants assessed for level of delusion- proneness. The results indicate that delusion-prone individuals are slower at processing angry faces, and show a general (rather than emotion-specific) impairment in facial affect recognition, compared to non-prone healthy controls. Visual scanpath studies show that healthy individuals tend to direct more foveal fixations to the feature areas (eyes, nose, mouth) of threat-related facial expressions (anger, fear). By contrast, delusion-prone individuals exhibit reduced foveal attention to threat-related faces, combined with �extended� scanpaths, that may be interpreted as an attentional pattern of �vigilance-avoidance� for social threat. Chapters 5 and 6 extend the work presented in Chapters 3 and 4, by investigating the presence of similar behavioural and attentional biases in deluded schizophrenia, compared to healthy control and non-deluded schizophrenia groups. Deluded schizophrenia subjects exhibited a similar delay in processing angry faces, compared to non-prone control participants, while both deluded and non-deluded schizophrenia groups displayed a generalised affect recognition deficit. Visual scanpath investigations revealed a similar style of avoiding a broader range of negative (anger, fear, sad) faces in deluded schizophrenia, as well as a common pattern of fewer fixations with shorter duration, and reduced attention to facial features of all faces in both deluded and non-deluded schizophrenia. The examination of inferential biases for emotions displayed in facial expressions is presented in Chapter 7 in a study of causal attributional style. The results of this study provide some support for a �self-serving� bias in deluded schizophrenia, as well as evidence for an inability to appreciate situational cues when making causal judgements in both delusion-prone and deluded schizophrenia. A theoretical integration of the current findings is presented in Chapter 8, with regard to the implications for cognitive theories of delusions, and neurobiological models of schizophrenia phenomena, more generally. Visual attention biases for threat-related facial expressions in delusion-prone and deluded schizophrenia are consistent with proposals of neural dysconnectivity between frontal-limbic networks, while attributional biases and impaired facial expression perception may reflect dysfunction in a broader �social brain� network encompassing these and medial temporal lobe regions. Strong evidence for attentional biases and affect recognition deficits in delusion-prone individuals implicates their role in the development of delusional beliefs, but the weaker evidence for attributional biases in delusion-prone individuals suggests that inferential biases about others� emotions may be relevant only to the maintenance of delusional beliefs (or that attributional biases for others� emotional states may reflect other, trait-linked difficulties related to mentalising ability). In summary, the work presented in this thesis demonstrates the utility of adopting a single-symptom approach to schizophrenia within the continuum framework, and attests to the importance of further investigations of aberrant social cognition in relation to the development of delusions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2007. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-56).

International studies of disasters indicate the risk for developing posttraumatic stress reactions among survivors is high. Modern life implicates increased traveling. During the last decades a large number of Swedish citizens were confronted with disasters taking place outside of their country. The prevalence of trauma reactions in a population that does not  normally  experience natural disasters, but are able to return to a community unaffected by the catastrophe, is not well studied. In addition, the effects of bereavement after traumatic circumstances have not been satisfactorily explored. Longitudinal studies on the effects of natural disasters are underrepresented and there are few studies investigating the course of recovery after traumatic exposure. The aim for this thesis was to examine long-term post-traumatic stress reactions, mental health, and complicated grief after disaster exposure and traumatic bereavement.  Data from returned questionnaires were analysed from bereaved Italian and Swedish relatives 18 months after the Linate airplane disaster 2001, and at 14 months and three years from Swedish travelers returning from Southeast Asia after the 2004 tsunami disaster, and from home staying bereaved relatives within the second year after the tsunami disaster. The main outcome measures were GHQ-12, IES-R and Inventory of Complicated Grief. The findings indicated many survivors were resilient and had ability to recover, but severe exposure to a disaster had considerable impact on psychological distress. Life threat was associated with higher levels of post-traumatic stress reactions, and increased the risk for affected mental health and suicidal ideation. Loss in combination with severe life threat exposure indicated a further increased risk of posttraumatic stress reactions and for complicated grief; this should be considered a substantial risk factor for general mental health. Loss of close relatives, especially loss of children, was associated with higher levels of posttraumatic stress and created a greater risk for complicated grief. Many survivors recovered over time; however, severe exposure and traumatic loss appeared to slow the recovery process. The findings have implications for government and health agencies, regarding the importance of knowledge and awareness of these risks for health, and for organizational structure, training, and accessibility of support and adequate treatment.

Dr. Lenore Walker developed battered woman syndrome to address the issue of domestic violence and to give battered women a defense in situations in which they kill their abusive partners when they are not overtly threatening them. Self-defense law is based on male on male combat. Women are less able to protect themselves in an attack by a man, and so they may preemptively attack their sleeping partners to avoid a situation in which they cannot adequately protect themselves. Battered woman syndrome explains why these battered women act in a way that is irrational to a non-battered person. Walker's theory of learned helplessness explains why the woman does not leave the abusive relationship, and the cycle of violence theory explains why she perceives an imminent threat. Battered woman syndrome is problematic in its legal application because of problems with its scientific validity and reliability. It also furthers gender stereotypes and blurs the line between a justification and an excuse defense. While, Dr. Walker's intentions were good, battered woman syndrome is inadequate. Women's difference from men still have to be acknowledged in cases in which battered women kill their husband's, but social agency framework is a more effective way to acknowledge gender differences. This framework takes into account social circumstances that would explain a woman's actions rather than including pathology. This would explain why the woman did not leave an abusive relationship. To avoid the pathology of BWS while explaining why the woman felt an imminent threat, the defense can turn to a pattern of abuse that helps her reasonably recognize when violence is likely.

Bakgrund: På 1990-talet började hot och våld inom vården uppmärksammas vilket ledde till fler rapporter framkom inom området. Det finns dock fortfarande ett behov av att olika riskfaktorer som påverkar hot och vålds utbredning och konsekvenserna för sjuksköterskan. Syfte: Syftet var att belysa riskfaktor som finns gällande hot och våld gentemot sjuksköterskor på somatiska sjukhusavdelningar för vuxna samt sjuksköterskans hantering och eventuella konsekvenser av hot och våld. Metod: Resultatet bygger på 17 kvantitativa vetenskapliga artiklar som kritiskt genomlästs och granskats. Resultat: Resultatet visade att det fanns organisatoriska, patient- och sjuksköterskerelaterade riskfaktorer för hot och våld. Det framkom att sjuksköterskor ofta fick emotionella men efter en incident. Det kunde även ge upphov till en osäkerhet gällande yrkesvalet. Det fanns en tveksamhet bland sjuksköterskor att rapportera hot- och våldsincidenter. Många valde att inte prata om det som skett. Det fanns även de sjuksköterskor som hanterade hot- och våldsincidenten genom att förändra sitt beteende. Resultatdiskussion: Utbildning inom hot och våld är en viktig preventiv åtgärd. Genom detta kan sjuksköterskan lära sig hantera utåtagerande patienter och därmed behålla sitt professionella förhållningssätt. Det är även viktigt att sjukvårdsledningen bjuder in till samtal efter incidenten för att öka sjuksköterskans trygghet i yrket. / Background: During the 1990s threat and violence began to be acknowledged, which lead to more reports in the area. But there is still a need to highlight different risk factors that affects the prevalence of threats and violence and the consequences for the nurse. Aim:  The aim of the study was to highlight risk factors regarding threats and violence against nurses in somatic hospital wards for adults, and the handling and eventual consequences of threats and violence against nurses. Method: The result is built up on 17 quantitative scientific articles that have been critically reviewed to get material relevant to this study. Results: The result shows that there are organizational, patient and nurse related threats and violence risk factors. It was shown that nurses often got emotional harms after an incident. This could also cause an insecurity regarding the career-choice. There was hesitation among nurses to report threat- and violence incidents and many chose not to talk about what had happened. There were also nurses that handled the threats and violence incidents by changing their behavior. Discussion of results: Education in threats and violence is an important preventive measure. By this the nurse can learn to handle outward behavioral patients and thereby remain a professional approach. It is also important that healthcare management invites to a dialog after the incidents to increase the nurses safety in their profession.

A mediated-moderation model of stereotype threat was tested. Domain identification and motivational orientation were treated as moderators of the threat effect on self-efficacy and cognitive interference, which were hypothesized to mediate the threat-performance relationship. Participants were primed with stereotype-consistent, stereotype inconsistent, or no information regarding sex differences in mathematical abilities. While significant performance differences were found between males and females in the control and threat conditions, no differences were found in a female benefit condition that described a math task as favoring females. Significant sex differences in domain identity and self-efficacy were also found. Post-hoc analyses revealed that domain identification and self-efficacy explained significant amounts of variance in sex differences in math performance. The results provide general support for Steeles theory of stereotype threat and resulting disidentification with the task domain among targets.