Performance, Emotions and Stereotype Threat

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.

But what if you don't think you can?  Current neurological research indicates that our performance is affected not only by our emotions but also by internalized stereotypes that impact our faith in our own abilities.  In today's "Science Journal" column (subscription required) in the Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley writes that...

After years of studying situations such as choking under pressure or succumbing to "stereotype threat" (in which you perform worse if you're reminded that your sex, race or age group tends to muff the test you're about to take), scientists are learning how emotion combines in the brain with memory, attention and other cognitive skills [to affect performance.]

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS] last weekend, researchers gave the lie to the belief that brain structures that think and ones that feel emotion are walled off from one another.  Instead, emotion and cognition mingle.  Activity in a particular brain region reflects the integration of cognition and emotion, explained Jeremy Gray of Yale University, and it isn't so simple as pleasant emotions being good for thinking and negative ones impairing it.

Begley's column discusses the work of Sian Leah Beilock, an Assistant Professor in the psychology department at the University of Chicago.  Beilock gave a presentation at the AAAS annual meeting on the "Interplay of Emotion and Cognition: Implications for Learning and High-Stakes Testing," and the conference synopsis of Beilock's presentation frames these issues concisely:

[H]igh-pressure or negative emotion-inducing situations can fundamentally alter skilled performance, preventing the recruitment of the cognitive and neural resources necessary for optimal skill execution. Moreover, these types of unwanted skill failures are often most likely to occur for those with the most to lose. In terms of minorities (e.g., African Americans in the classroom) or underrepresented groups (e.g., women in math), just being aware of a negative stereotype concerning how one’s social group should perform can inhibit learning and performance in stereotype-relevant skill domains.

The world's leading neuroscientists don't know how to solve these problems, so don't expect to find any definitive answers here.  But I'm struck by two things: First, some of the solutions are quite simple.  As Begley writes...

[A] study about to be published examined the effect of the "what is your sex?" question that appears on standardized tests.  If it were moved from the top of the Advanced Placement calculus AB test to the end, 4,700 more girls in a typical year (out of about 80,000 female students who take it) would score high enough to receive AP credit.

How many other quick fixes like this would help to level the playing field and diminish the impact of stereotype threat?

And second, even if scientists don't yet know just how our emotions affect our performance at a neurological level, there are still steps we can take as individuals to be better equipped to cope with this dynamic.  What I've learned as a student and a facilitator in the Interpersonal Dynamics course at Stanford's Graduate School of Business has allowed me to better understand my emotions and how they affect my professional performance for better and for worse.  That's just one methodology out of any number of possibilities; my larger point is that getting in touch with our emotions and learning to express them effectively has the potential not only to make us feel better, but also to help us perform better.

Further reading: Beilock's PhD dissertation, When Performance Fails: Expertise, Attention and Performance Under Pressure.

Comments

[peter vajda]

Self-images trigger thoughts, which trigger emotions. So it's no new knowldge that "who I think I am" "who I think I should be" will trigger emotions and the energy of the emotion (fear, for example) triggers another response, e.g., fight, flight, freeze. When one goes through the emotion, into it to explore and inquire into it, instead of around it, one can gain insight into what's underneath the emotion (usually chidhood experiences) and get to the origin of the self-image and then work to melt that image. (change is not about will-power) If I think I can, if I think I can't, I'm right. At the top of a roller coaster, one can scream with excitement or one can scream with fear...it's the same energy, but how I choose to interpret this energy (often unconscious) depends on my self image, who I take myself to be (risk-taker vs. fearful person, for example).
The emotions are the doorway in to understanding making efforts towards true and lasting change and transformation...not the "logical mind."