Factors of the Self-Concept

The Biology of the Individual

What are you made of? Biological factors such as genetics and neural architecture play an important role in how individuals navigate their environment and encode self-relevant information.  Exploring these biological factors is critical for understanding information processing in individuals, especially those prone to stereotype threats.  Brain-derived neurotropic factors (BDNF), baseline connectivity of neural networks, and amygdala reactivity all affect how individuals perceive identity-threatening contexts. Current studies explore the downstream consequences of these biological factors in stigmatized individuals and their disengagement with identity-threatening domains.

Relationships with Close and Novel Others

How well do you play with others?  Other individuals in one’s immediate environment can have direct ramifications on how an individual processes information, especially when identity-threats are present.  Cues that trigger stereotype threat (ST) among women in STEM are present in popular group-based learning contexts. The negative consequences of ST on individual women in STEM are clear. A critical question is whether the negative stress-oriented effects of ST transmit to other non-threatened women via stereotype-based stress contagion (SBSC). Neural synchrony between emotion networks in the brain was operationalized as an index of SBSC.  How this contagion altered interactions among women in dyadic performance contexts was observed while recording continuous EEG activity.  Results reveal ST actors’ connectivity between brain regions integral for emotion predicted connectivity in the same emotion network among non-threatened female partners over time. This synchrony between ST actors and partners also predicted decreased performance in the partner overtime. Partners buffered ST actors’ performance. Results reveal how SBSC may engender negative group outcomes in performance contexts via brain synchrony, particularly for individuals partnered with a peer experiencing ST.

Extensions of the above project are currently being analyzed.  These analyses include exploring how male partners may influence SBSC and how SBSC manifests in real-world field settings using wireless EEG technology at local high schools.

Environment

Where are you from? Growing up in various parts of the world inevitably affects how individuals perceive later contexts. For example, a recent global meta-analysis by Else-Quest et al., (2010), demonstrated that overall boys and girls performed comparably in math domains. However, when there was a difference in math achievement between boys and girls in a given country, it was because these countries were more misogynistic in general. The extent to which there was gender equity in school enrollment, research-oriented jobs, and parliamentary representation predicted gender differences. Fifteen years’ worth of stereotype threat studies from the lab were gathered to replicate the meta-analysis findings. From these studies, the zip-codes of all participants were collected. Collaborating with the U.S. census and the University of Delaware GIS department, variables that represent misogyny from students’ hometowns were extracted to explore the effects of the upbringing of participants on how they performed in their STEM classes.

Self-Perceptions

What expectations do you have for yourself? Neural processing mechanisms differ depending on one’s expectations for themselves in novel environments to maintain or change self-perceptions. For example, under normal circumstances, individuals like to keep positive self-perceptions. Episodic and semantic processes interact to affect how individuals encode social feedback to maintain these perceptions in the face of self-threatening information. To understand the mechanism behind this, Granger Causality was used to index semantic (mPFC-based) and episodic (PCC-based) processes on-line. Increased communication stemming from the mPFC to the PCC during feedback encoding (indicative of semantic processing) biased how individuals encoded both negative and positive social feedback to maintain their self-perceptions. This bias predicted more positive self-perceptions overall.

In contrast, exposure to self-threatening feedback received in contexts that engender negative stereotypic primes (raising negative expectations) triggered more episodic emotional encoding that changed self-perceptions. Emotional encoding was operationalized through modularity graph theory analyses of the emotion network in women exposed to a ST context. ST confirming information was accurately encoded through this network undermining women’s performance, self-enhancement, and self-perceptions in this context, leading them to disengage.

Current projects focus on how expectations about a novel trait influence memory encoding, attention, and recall of the experience to alter future decisions and change self-perceptions.