Stress engendered by stereotype threatening situations may facilitate encoding of negative, stereotype confirming feedback received during a performance among women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It is unclear, however, whether this process is comprised of the same neurophysiological mechanisms evident in any emotional memory encoding context, or if this encoding bias directly undermines positive self-perceptions in the stigmatized domain. A total of 160 men and women completed a math test that provided veridical positive and negative feedback, a memory test for feedback, and math self-enhancing and valuing measures in a stereotype threatening or neutral context while continuous electroencephalography activity and startle probe responses to positive and negative feedback was recorded. Indexing amygdala activity to feedback via startle responses and emotional memory network connectivity elicited during accurate recognition of positive and negative feedback via graph analyses, only stereotype threatened women encoded negative feedback better when they exhibited increased amygdala activity and emotional memory network connectivity in response to said feedback. Emotional memory biases, in turn, predicted decreases in women’s self-enhancing, math valuing and performance. Findings provide an emotional memory encoding-based mechanism for well-established findings indicating that women have more negative math self-perceptions compared with men regardless of actual performance.

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Though debated, it has been argued that self-face recognition is an indicator of consciousness of self typically called self-awareness. Evidence from behavioral and neuronal studies suggests that self-recognition is associated with activation in the right prefrontal cortex (PFC). Although previous studies have examined neurological correlates of deficits in self-recognition (e.g., autism, schizophrenia), the current study attempted to examine neurological correlates of inflated self-focus. Thus, this study used transcranial magnetic stimulation to assess neurological correlates of self-recognition in different regions of the PFC and to assess whether narcissistic personality traits would be correlated with reaction time (RT) among 11 healthy participants. It was found that RT for self-face identification was positively correlated with narcissistic personality traits (p = .034). It was also found that the interaction between brain region and RT for self-faces was significant after narcissism was controlled for, demonstrating an association between narcissistic traits and self-recognition (p = .036). The results support previous research indicating the right PFC is necessary for self-face recognition. Furthermore, increases in narcissistic traits decreased self-recognition RT, and self-recognition appeared to be mediated via right PFC regions.