New Smith College Study

Don't Tell Her She Can't Succeed; Smith College Study Reveals How Stereotypical Messages Affect Women's Brains

NORTHAMPTON, Mass., Jan. 4 (AScribe Newswire) -- When told she will not succeed, a woman's brain can take on an emotional burden that inhibits her ability to succeed, according to a Smith College study that documents, for the first time, the brain regions affected by positive and negative stereotypes.

Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to document the brain activity in 54 women between the ages of 18 and 34, after they read a stereotypical message about women and then performed a spatial reasoning task. The task required them to view pictures of objects and describe what the objects would look like from different, imagined perspectives.

The group exposed to a negative stereotype made 6 percent more errors than the group exposed to a neutral message, and 14 percent more errors than the group exposed to a positive stereotype. No difference was found in the response time across groups.

Poor performance in the negative stereotype group corresponded to increased activity in brain regions associated with increased emotional load. By contrast, the better performance of women in the positive stereotype group was associated with increased activity in visual processing areas and complex short-term memory processing areas.

"The results demonstrate the remarkable power of culture in determining performance," said Maryjane Wraga, associate professor of psychology at Smith, and lead author on the study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

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