Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-f554764f5-qhdkw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-12T22:38:06.873Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

14 - Generative Reasoning as Influenced by Depression, Aging, Stereotype Threat, and Prejudice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2010

By
Ulrich von Hecker ,
Grzegorz Sedek ,
Kinga Piber-Dabrowska  and
Sylwia Bedynska
Edited by
Randall W. Engle ,
Grzegorz Sedek ,
Ulrich von Hecker  and
Daniel N. McIntosh
Ulrich von Hecker
Affiliation:
Lecturer, School of Psychology at Cardiff University
Grzegorz Sedek
Affiliation:
Director of the Institute of Social Psychology, Warsaw School of Social Psychology in Poland and professor at the Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences
Kinga Piber-Dabrowska
Affiliation:
Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Chodakowska 19/31, 03-815 Warsaw, Poland
Sylwia Bedynska
Affiliation:
Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Chodakowska 19/31, 03-815 Warsaw, Poland
Randall W. Engle
Affiliation:
Georgia Institute of Technology
Grzegorz Sedek
Affiliation:
Warsaw School of Social Psychology and Polish Academy of Sciences
Ulrich von Hecker
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
Daniel N. McIntosh
Affiliation:
University of Denver
Get access

Summary

This last and interdisciplinary chapter begins with the observation that in many psychological subdisciplines that call themselves “cognitive,” there is a continuous debate about the specific nature of the mental limitations across different populations. Research in the cognitive aging area focuses on comparisons between older and younger adults in different basic cognitive functions (e.g., attention, working memory) and higher order cognitive functions (e.g., reasoning, comprehension). Research in the cognitive psychopathology area centers around similar comparisons and distinctions among emotionally disturbed versus emotionally stable participants. Finally, in the social cognition area, cognitive limitations and biases produced by strong prejudice or stereotypes are central issues. Researchers from the previously-mentioned domains often refer to the same psychological mechanisms that might interfere with effective cognitive processing. Just to mention a few, these include lack of motivation or cognitive initiative, limited cognitive resources, inefficient inhibitory mechanisms, or oversimplified strategies of information processing. However, there are very few attempts to directly compare the mechanisms underlying those impairments and limitations across different research domains using the same cognitive tasks.

In this chapter, we describe one of our research projects that aimed to compare the performance of individuals from different populations on the same generative reasoning tasks. The populations included depressed versus nondepressed students, older versus younger adults, students threatened by stereotype versus control students, and finally, students with high versus low levels of ethnic prejudice. We noticed that similar kinds of explanations have been suggested to explain the reduced cognitive performance in some of these groups.

Type
Chapter
Information
Cognitive Limitations in Aging and Psychopathology , pp. 377 - 401
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Bargh, S. A., & Thein, R. D. (1985). Individual construct accessibility, person memory, and the recall-judgment-link: The case of information overload. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 1129–1146.CrossRef
Beck, A. T. (1967). Depression: Causes and treatment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Bedynska, S., Sedek, G., & Brzezicka-Rotkiewicz, A. (2004). The analysis of cognitive impairments among targets of negative stereotype: The integrative reasoning and performance of complex working memory tasks. Paper presented at the Small Group Meeting of EAESP on Understanding the Academic Underachievement of Low Status Group Members (Paris, France).
Bodenhausen, G. V., Macrae, C. N., & Sherman, J. W. (1999). On the dialectics of discrimination: Dual processes in social stereotyping. In Chaiken, S. & Trope, Y. (Eds.), Dual-process theories in social psychology (pp. 271–290). New York, London: The Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Bruner, J. (1957). On perceptual readiness. Psychological Review, 64, 123–152.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carlson, R. A., & Sohn, M.-H. (2000). Cognitive control of multistep routines: Information processing and conscious intentions. In Monsell, S. & Driver, J. (Eds.), Attention and performance XVIII (pp. 443–464). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Channon, S., Baker, J. E., & Robertson, M. M. (1993). Effects of structure and clustering on recall and recognition memory in clinical depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 102, 323–326.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Conway, M., & Giannopoulos, C. (1993). Dysphoria and decision making: Limited information use for evaluations of multiattribute targets. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 613–623.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Craik, F. I. M., & Salthouse, T. A. (2000). The handbook of aging and cognition (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Crandall, C. S., & Eshleman, A. (2003). A justification-suppression model of the expression and experience of prejudice. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 414–446.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dorfman, D. D., Keeve, S., & Saslow, C. (1971). Ethnic identification: A signal detection analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18, 373–379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, H. C., & Ashbrook, P. W. (1988). Resource allocation model of the effects of depressed mood states on memory. In Fiedler, K. & Forgas, J. (Eds.), Affect, cognition, and social behaviour (pp. 25–43), Göttingen, Federal Republic of Germany: Hogrefe.Google Scholar
Ellis, H. C., Ottaway, S. A., Varner, L. J., Becker, A. S., & Moore, B. A. (1997). Emotion, motivation, and text comprehension: The detection of contradictions in passages. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126, 131–146.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Emmorey, K. (2001). Space on hand: The exploitation of signing space to illustrate abstract thought. In Gattis, M. (Ed.), Spatial schemas and abstract thought (pp. 147–174). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Engle, R. W. (1996). Working memory, and retrieval: An inhibition-resource approach. In Richardson, J. T. E., Engle, R., Hasher, L., Logie, R., Stoltzfus, E., & Zacks, R. (Eds.), Working memory in human cognition (pp. 89–119). New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiske, S. T. (1998). Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. In Gilbert, D. T., Fiske, S. T., & Lindzey, G. (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 357–411). New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Glenberg, A. M., & Langston, W. E. (1992). Comprehension of illustrated text: Pictures help to build mental models. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 129–151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glenberg, A. M., Meyer, M., & Lindem, K. (1987). Mental models contribute to foregrounding during text comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 69–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gotlib, I. H., Roberts, J. E., & Gilboa, E. (1996). Cognitive interference in depression. In Sarason, I. G., Pierce, G., & Sarason, B. R. (Eds.), Cognitive interference. Theories, methods, and findings (pp. 347–377). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464–1480.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Halford, G. S. (1993). Children's understanding. The development of mental models. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Hambrick, D. Z., & Engle, R. W. (2003). The role of working memory in problem solving. In Davidson, J. E. & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.), The psychology of problem solving (pp. 176–206). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hampton, J. A. (1997). Emergent attributes in combined concepts. In Ward, T. B., Smith, S. M., & Vaid, J. (Eds.), Creative thought: An investigation of conceptual structures and processes (pp. 83–110). Washington: APA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hastie, R. (1980). Memory for behavioral information that confirms or contradicts a personality impression. In Hastie, R., Ostrom, T. M., Ebbesen, E. B., Wyer, R. S., Hamilton, D. L., & Carlston, D. E. (Eds.), Person Memory: The cognitive basis of social perception (pp. 155–178). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Hertel, P. T., & Rude, S. S. (1991). Depressive deficits in memory: Focusing attention improves subsequent recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 120, 301–309.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hess, T. M., Bolstad, C. A., Woodburn, S. M., & Auman, C. (1999). Trait diagnosticity versus behavioral consistency as determinants of impression change in adulthood. Psychology and Aging, 1, 77–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holyoak, K. J., & Patterson, K. K. (1981). A positional discriminability model of linearorder judgement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 7, 1283–1302.Google Scholar
Huttenlocher, J. (1968). Constructing spatial images: A strategy in reasoning. Psychological Review, 75, 550–560.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1972). The three-term series problem. Cognition, 1, 57–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference and consciousness. Cambridge, UK: University Press.Google Scholar
Kawakami, K., Dion, K., & Dovidio, J. F. (1998). Racial prejudice and stereotype activation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 407–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kliegl, R., Mayr, U., & Oberauer, K. (2000). Resource limitations and process dissociations in individual differences research. In Hecker, U. V., Dutke, S., & Sedek, G. (Eds.), Generative mental processes and cognitive resources: Integrative research in adaptation and control (pp. 337–366). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kofta, M., & Sedek, G. (1989). Repeated failure: A source of helplessness, or a factor irrelevant to its emergence?Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 3–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lepore, L., & Brown, R. (1997). Category and stereotype activation: Is prejudice inevitable?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 275–287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leth-Steensen, C., & Marley, A. A. J. (2000). A model or response time effect in symbolic comparison. Psychological Review, 107, 62–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Light, L. L. (1996). Memory and aging. In Bjork, E. L. & Bjork, R. A. (Eds.), Handbook of perception and cognition: Memory (pp. 443–490). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Macrae, C. N., Milne, A. B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (1994a). Stereotypes as energy-saving devices: A peek inside the cognitive toolbox. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 37–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macrae, C. N., Stangor, C., & Milne, A. B. (1994b). Activating social stereotypes: A functional analysis. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 370–389.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marx, E. M., Williams, J. M. G., & Claridge, G. C. (1992). Depression and social problem solving. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 101, 78–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McGonigle, B., & Chalmers, M. (1984). The selective impact of question form and input mode on the symbolic distance effect in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 37, 525–554.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mynatt, B. T., & Smith, K. H. (1977). Constructive processes in linear order problems revealed by sentence study times. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 3, 357–374.Google Scholar
Oberauer, K., Süß, H.-M., Wilhelm, O., & Wittmann, W. W. (2003). The multiple faces of working memory – storage, processing, supervision, and coordination. Intelligence, 31, 167–193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perfect, T. J., & Maylor, E. A. (2000). Models of cognitive aging. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1974). The child's construction of quantities: Conservation and atomism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Piber-Dabrowska, K. (2000). Affective processing of information about the out-group: On the relationship between explicit and implicit evaluative associations. Paper presented at the workshop on Prosocial Behavior, Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Germany.Google Scholar
Piber-Dabrowska, K., & Sedek, G. (2004). Prejudice and reasoning about linear orders. Paper presented at the ESCON Transfer of Knowledge Conference, Lisbon, Portugal.
Potts, G. R. (1972). Information processing strategies used in the encoding of linear orderings. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 727–740.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quinn, D. M., & Spencer, S. J. (2001). The interference of stereotype threat with women's generation of mathematical problem solving strategies. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 55–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rabinowitz, F. M., Grant, M. J., Howe, M. L., & Walsh, C. (1994). Reasoning in middle childhood: A dynamic model of performance on transitive tasks. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 58, 252–288.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salthouse, T. A. (1990). Working-memory as a processing resource in cognitive aging. Developmental Review, 10, 101–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salthouse, T. A. (1992). Working-memory mediation of adult age differences in integrative reasoning. Memory and Cognition, 20, 413–423.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salthouse, T. A. (1996). The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition. Psychological Review, 103, 403–428.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salthouse, T. A., Legg, S., Palmon, R., & Mitchell, D. (1990). Memory factors in age-related differences in simple reasoning. Psychology and Aging, 5, 9–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salthouse, T. A., Mitchell, D. R. D., Skovronek, E., & Babcock, R. L. (1989). Effects of adult age and working memory on reasoning and spatial abilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 507–516.Google ScholarPubMed
Schmader, T., & Johns, M. (2003). Converging evidence that stereotype threat reduces working memory capacity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 440–452.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sedek, G., & Kofta, M. (1990). When cognitive exertion does not yield cognitive gain: Toward an informational explanation of learned helplessness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 729–743.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedek, G., & Hecker, U. (2004). Effects of subclinical depression and aging on generative reasoning about linear orders: Same or different processing limitations? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 237–260.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sherman, J. W. (2001). The dynamic relationship between stereotype efficiency and mental representation. In Moskowitz, G. B. (Ed.), Cognitive social psychology: The Princeton symposium on the legacy and future of social cognition (pp. 177–190). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Sherman, J. W., Lee, A. Y., Bessenoff, G. R., & Frost, L. A. (1998). Stereotype efficiency reconsidered: Encoding flexibility under cognitive load. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 589–606.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shih, M., Pittinsky, T. L., & Ambady, N. (1999). Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance. Psychological Science, 10, 80–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, J. D., Tracy, J. I., & Murray, M. J. (1993). Depression and category learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 331–346.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, K. H., & Foos, P. W. (1975). Effect of presentation order on the construction of linear orders. Memory and Cognition, 3, 614–618.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sohn, M.-H., & Carlson, R. A. (1998). Procedural frameworks for simple arithmetic skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 1052–1067.Google Scholar
Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women's math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 4–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Srull, T. K., & Wyer, R. S. (1989). Person memory and judgment. Psychological Review, 96, 58–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African American. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 797–811.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (1980). Representation and process in linear syllogistic reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 109, 119–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trabasso, T., Riley, C. A., & Wilson, E. G. (1975). The representation of linear order and spatial strategies in reasoning: A developmental study. In Falmagne, R. (Ed.), Reasoning: Representation and process (pp. 201–229). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Turner, M. L., & Engle, R. W. (1989). Is working memory capacity task dependent?Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 127–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tzelgov, J., Yehene, V., Kotler, L., & Alon, A. (2000). Automatic comparisons of artificial digits never compared: Learning linear ordering relations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 26, 103–120.Google ScholarPubMed
Hecker, U., & Sedek, G. (1999). Uncontrollability, depression, and the construction of mental models. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 833–850.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hecker, U., Sedek, G., & McIntosh, D. N. (2000). Impaired systematic, higher order strategies in depression and helplessness: Testing implications of the cognitive exhaustion model. In vonHecker, U., Dutke, S., & Sedek, G. (Eds.), Generative mental processes and cognitive resources: Integrative research on adaptation and control (pp. 245–275). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hippel, W., Sekaquapteva, D., & Vargas, P. (1995). On the role of encoding processes in stereotype maintenance. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 27, 177–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zabrucky, K., Moore, D., & Schultz, N. R.. (1993). Young and older adults' ability to use different standards to evaluate understanding. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 48, P238–P244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×