An ERP Study of the Temporal Course of Gender–Color Stroop Effect

Abstract

Pink and blue colors have been found to associate with gender stereotypes in previous Western studies. The purpose of the present study was to explore the neuropsychological processing basis of this effect in contemporary Chinese society. We presented stereotypically masculine or feminine occupation words in either pink or blue colors to Chinese college students in a modified Stroop paradigm, in which participants were asked to classify each occupation word by gender as quickly and accurately as possible. Event-related potential (ERP) signals were concurrently recorded in order to identify the temporal dynamics of gender stereotypical interference effect. The behavioral results showed that pink–masculine stimuli elicited a longer response time and lower accuracy than blue–masculine stimuli in the participants, while no such differences were observed between pink–feminine and blue–feminine conditions. The ERP results further revealed distinctive neural processing stages for pink–masculine stimuli (i.e., in comparison to the other three types of stimuli) in P200, N300, N400, and P600. Overall, our results suggested that pink but not blue was a “gendered” color in Chinese culture. Moreover, our ERP findings contributed to the understanding of the neural mechanism underlying the processing of gender–color stereotypes.

English colour terms carry gender and valence biases: A corpus study using word embeddings

“…Indeed, blue seems gender-neutral, equally liked by males and females of all ages [9,[51][52][53][54][55][56]. Blue might turn into a symbol of masculinity, or boyhood, only when paired with pink, which in turn is a symbol of femininity and girliness, because pink is avoided by boys, men, and some adult women (see a more in-depth reasoning in [9,57]). In fact, a recent study using a Stroop paradigm demonstrated that masculine words written in pink ink were perceived as being more incongruent than feminine words written in blue ink [57].…”

“…Blue might turn into a symbol of masculinity, or boyhood, only when paired with pink, which in turn is a symbol of femininity and girliness, because pink is avoided by boys, men, and some adult women (see a more in-depth reasoning in [9,57]). In fact, a recent study using a Stroop paradigm demonstrated that masculine words written in pink ink were perceived as being more incongruent than feminine words written in blue ink [57]. As for red, we expected, but did not find a masculinity bias, due to its associations with power and dominance [15][16][17][18].…”

An automatic red-female association tested by the Stroop task

“…Thus, pink and blue color cues were sufficient to trigger the activation of gender-related knowledge, indicating the automaticity of category activation from color cues (Bargh, 1999;Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Li et al (2021) examined color-gender Stroop effect (pink-female/blue-male) in Chinese participant and observed that pink but not blue was a "gendered" color, that masculine words in pink ink were perceived as more incongruent than feminine words in blue ink.…”

Red background color biases gender categorization of human faces

“…Green was selected because it is one of the colors associated with male 7 , 8 and the opposite color of red in many well-established color models 41 . We did not select blue as a choice due to its prevalence as a more preferred color among both males and females 16 , 42 , as well as empirical evidence indicating its lack of gender bias 43 , 44 . Gray was chosen as an achromatic contrasting color that can be matched for saturation and lightness 45 , 46 .…”