Inhaltszusammenfassung

Anxiety is found to have a negative impact on cognitive performance, and women are found to have a greater fear of tasks that require mental rotations and also perform significantly worse than men at them. Therefore, spatial anxiety is considered as one driver for the gender gap in STEM domains, where spatial skills are seen as a strong predictor of success and career. Although it has already been shown that the activation of stereotypes can influence situation-specific anxiety, there is stil...Anxiety is found to have a negative impact on cognitive performance, and women are found to have a greater fear of tasks that require mental rotations and also perform significantly worse than men at them. Therefore, spatial anxiety is considered as one driver for the gender gap in STEM domains, where spatial skills are seen as a strong predictor of success and career. Although it has already been shown that the activation of stereotypes can influence situation-specific anxiety, there is still little research on whether stereotyped test materials themselves also influence levels of anxiety and thus whether there might be a link between stereotypically male test items in mental-rotation tests, spatial anxiety and gender differences in performance. The influence of spatial anxiety on test performance might be fostered by the fact that the test material is stereotyped male in the commonly used mental-rotation tests with cube figures. In the present study novel polyhedral figures consisting of individual cuboctahedra bodies were used as stimuli to investigate sex differences in mental-rotation performance. Because the novel figures were rated in a gender-neutral manner compared to cube figures, we studied if spatial task anxiety with these items is still related to performance. We assumed that there were no gender differences in performance and in difficulty ratings. Until now 59 male and female adult participants solved a chronometric mental-rotation task with the novel polyhedral stimuli, then filled out a self-assessment of their mental-rotation performance and answered the questions of the Modified-Spatial Anxiety Scale (M-SAS), which was translated into German. The data collection is not yet completed. Results tend to support the existence of emotion-based stereotype threat- and -lift effects and emphasizing spatial skills as a male domain. They are discussed in terms of item-specific factors in the assessment of mental-rotation performance that may contribute to widening the gender gap in STEM.» weiterlesen» einklappen

Autoren

Klassifikation

DFG Fachgebiet:
Psychologie

DDC Sachgruppe:
Psychologie