The purpose of the proposed research was to investigate how contextual features of a situation affect cognitive performance. Specifically, this research explored the role that a social characteristic of the testing situation, group composition, had on memory performance. The study tested older adults (N=72) between the ages of 65 and 75 who were evenly divided into three testing conditions. In the minority status condition, one older adult was tested with two younger adult confederates whereas in the majority status condition, older adults were tested with two similarly aged individuals. The third condition involved individualized testing. It was expected that older adults would experience stereotype threat in the minority status condition and that this would result in poorer performance on a memory task relative to those in the majority status and alone conditions. Contrary to expectations, memory performance did not significantly differ between the three conditions, providing no support for the hypothesis that group composition at testing would be related to stereotype threat . In addition, no evidence was found that the hypothesized moderators (stigma consciousness, value placed on memory) and mediators (anxiety, evaluation apprehension, strategy use) were related to threat-based effects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NCSU/oai:NCSU:etd-05112005-023212 |
| Date | 16 May 2005 |
| Creators | Osowski, Nicole Lyn |
| Contributors | Dr. Thomas Hess |
| Publisher | NCSU |
| Source Sets | North Carolina State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-05112005-023212/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to NC State University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
Page generated in 0.0018 seconds