My research interests lie in two areas. One area is in prejudice and stereotyping, where I am interested in both the perceiver's and the target's perspective. The other area is cognition and aging, where I am interested in the role of inhibition in visual cognition across the adult lifespan, as well as how social factors impact cognitive processes such as memory or attention.
Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination
Examining the perceiver's perspective
One of the questions we have been exploring with respect to the perceiver's perspective concerns whether combinations of group identities (e.g., race and age) differentially influence perceivers' reactions. Most prior research on reactions to target group members has focused on reactions based on single group identities and associated stereotypes. Given that people often clearly belong to more than one type of group (e.g., race, gender, or age groups), we wanted to know how the complex interplay of these multiple group identities and stereotypes influences responses to target individuals. We found that combinations of group identities do moderate reactions to people, such that perceivers detected emotional expressions on the faces of target individuals differently depending on the combination of group identities that was presented (Kang & Chasteen, 2009a).
Another issue we have been examining in my lab regarding the role of group identities in perceptions of others is how people's future group identities might influence their reactions to others. In particular, my students and I have been investigating how responses to outgroup members might be affected when we remind participants that the current outgroup will one day become an ingroup. Specifically, we found that having young adults envision their future aged identities affected their attitudes and stereotypes of older adults, and that these effects were moderated by their level of identification with their young adult age group (Packer & Chasteen, 2006). Those who were strongly identified with being a young adult were more negative toward today's seniors after imagining their own future aged selves, whereas those who were weakly identified were more positive toward seniors after envisioning growing old. In another study we found that people rely on stereotypes in order to construct their future identities (Remedios, Chasteen, & Packer, in press). We found evidence of a positivity bias in young adults' representations of their future aged selves, such that they included more positive stereotypic features in their self-descriptions when possible, and focused on the loss of positive features when forced to consider what they feared about their future aged identities.
Examining the target's perspectiveOne issue my students and I have been investigating with respect to the target's perspective is how stereotypes and prejudice affect stigmatized individuals. One group that we have been examining the impact of prejudice on is older adults. My students and I have found that the degree to which people feel threatened about having aging stereotypes applied to them predicted their performance on various memory tasks (Chasteen, Bhattarcharyya, Horhota, Tam, & Hasher, 2005). This was the first study to demonstrate that people's actual feelings of threat influence their cognitive function. More recently, we found additional support for the role of perceptions of stereotype threat in reduced cognitive function and well-being in older adults (Kang & Chasteen, 2009b). We also have developed a measure to assess older adults' levels of sensitivity to age-based prejudice in order to better identify those older adults who are most vulnerable to the effects of age stigma (Kang & Chasteen, 2009c).
Another aspect of the target's perspective that we are examining is the experience of multiracial people. Most research on the experience of prejudice and stigma has focused on the experiences of monoracial minorities. Some recent work in my lab has shown that multiracial people also feel stigmatized, but in a manner different from monoracial people (Remedios & Chasteen, submitted). Specifically, we found that multiracial people focus more on concerns about being misperceived by others due to ambiguity about their racial background, whereas monoracial people focus more on concerns about being stereotyped due to their racial background. We are currently conducting additional studies to better understand reactions to multiracial people as well as to understand multiracial people's own experiences of having more complex racial identities.
Cognition and Aging
My colleagues and I have been investigating the extent to which aging impacts visual attention processes in older adults. More specifically, we have examined whether there are adult age differences in inhibition of return (IOR, a bias against returning attention to a location or object that has been recently attended) to determine how aging might impact attentional orienting. Across a series of papers, my colleagues and I have investigated whether there are adult age differences in the time course of IOR (Castel, Chasteen, Scialfa, & Pratt, 2003), in object- versus location-based IOR (McAuliffe, Chasteen, & Pratt, 2006), and in IOR produced by multiple cues (Pratt & Chasteen, 2007). Although this work has revealed several commonalities between younger and older adults regarding IOR, several distinct differences have been observed as well.
As noted above, I am also interested in how social factors such as aging stereotypes affect cognitive function across the adult lifespan, particularly in terms of the effect of stereotype threat on memory function in older adults (Chasteen et al., 2005; Kang & Chasteen, 2009b). As well, I have begun to examine how other socially-held constructs such as metaphors influence lower-level processes such as attentional orienting. Recently, my colleagues and I (Chasteen, Burdzy, & Pratt, in press) found that priming individuals with concepts related to God and Devil led them to orient their attention to corresponding locations (i.e., God: up/right; Devil: down/left). This finding has implications for how 'higher' cognitive processes (i.e., abstract concepts) interact with 'lower' cognitive processes (i.e., visual attention system).