The Mental Representation of Occupational Stereotypes is Driven As Much By Their Affective As By Their Semantic Content

Abstract

Background: Studies on person perception showed that stereotypes can be activated by presenting either characteristic traits of group members, or labels associated to these groups. However, it is not clear whether these pieces of semantic information activate negative and positive stereotypes directly, or via an indirect cognitive pathway leading through brain regions responsible for affective responses. To disentangle the effects of semantic and affective contents, first we intended to scrutinize whether the representation of occupational labels is independent of the emotions they evoke.Methods: Participants (N = 71, M=27.0, SD=9.1, 31 men 42 women,) were asked to complete two tasks presented online. In the first task they had to arrange 20 occupational labels—randomly chosen from a pool of 60 items— in a two-dimensional space, moving the mouse pointer along two undefined axes. In a second task the axes’ names were defined a priori. Subjects were asked to arrange the labels according to valence, the extent to which the word evoked pleasant or unpleasant feelings, and arousal, the extent to which the word evoked excitement or calmness. Results: Based on the final coordinates of the labels, two cluster analyses were carried out separately in the two tasks. The two clusters were compared with Fisher’s exact test, which revealed that the cluster structures overlap significantly.Conclusions: The results suggest that the semantic representation of occupations relies largely on the affective state they evoke. We propose that affective content might have a primacy over detailed semantic information in many aspects of person perception, including categorization and face recognition.