Here's the brief write-up of my idea I gave my advisor before starting--
Research Question: Does stereotype threat affect cognition in people with schizophrenia?
Stereotype threat is the fear that one's behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies. Research has shown that this can impair performance, particularly on cognitive tasks. Aronson and Steele are the most notable researchers in this area, and they have discovered that groups who are often seen as being poor academic performers in certain areas, e.g. women in mathematics, will actually perform worse on a difficult math test when gender is emphasized. One hypothesis is that the mention of gender creates anxiety, which the subjects must then suppress throughout the test. Thought suppression drains a considerable amount of working memory, leaving less mental resources with which to complete the task. Additionally, the stereotype threat condition may produce physical symptoms of anxiety that interfere with concentration.
In society, schizophrenia is often associated with instability, disorganization, volatility, and even violence. On a clinical level, we often find that people with schizophrenia have cognitive impairments, particularly in the domains of working memory and attention, which along with positive and negative symptoms, often interfere with academic and vocational achievement. In short, people with schizophrenia are often seen as less capable than people without the disorder. I would like to see to what degree these perceptions of schizophrenia affect people with the disorder. There is no doubt that the disorder itself produces impairment on cognitive tasks, but I want to know if this is exacerbated by a stereotype threat condition similar to that designed by Aronson and Steele. As far as I know, no one has previously measured the effect of stereotype threat on cognition in people with schizophrenia.
Basic study design: In the first group, the control group, the participants would be simply be told ‘this is a test of cognitive ability,' and instructed to complete the task. The second group would be told, ‘this is a test of cognitive ability, comparing the scores of
people with schizophrenia to people who do not have the disorder.' In the
third group, the participants would be told, ‘This is a test of cognitive
ability, comparing the scores of people with schizophrenia to the normal
population. People with schizophrenia tend not to perform as well on this
task, so don't worry if some of the questions are too hard for you. Just
answer them to the best of your ability.' My hypothesis
is that group one will have the best scores and group three will have the worst. I'm including group two because I believe that simply reminding people of their condition will produce lower scores (because stereotype threat research has shown that simply reminding people, e.g. African Americans, of their ethnicity prior to a test is enough to lower scores, even if they are not told that African Americans tend to perform poorly on the task). I also have read that telling a certain group that they perform poorly compared to another group produces lower test scores. I am curious to see how much the scores of people in the third condition, I guess you could call it the ‘stigma' condition, differ from the scores of people in the neutral reminder condition. And of course how much they differ from the control group.
... so that's my basic hypothesis, but most stereo threat studies have involved mathematical performance and I don't want to do that because of differing levels of education in my subjects. Basically I just need several challenging tasks for them to do so I can see if performance actually differs between groups. I would like at least one measure that strongly relies on working memory (possibly a verbal memory test), and one that does not. This would help me establish whether reduced performance (if there is any) is caused by a reduction in WM capacity (presumably caused by anxiety--I'm hoping to measure anxiety using the State-Trait but I haven't figured out if/how I'll worth that in yet) or if tests that don't require a lot of WM (such as the stroop task) also have significant variance between groups.
Mind you I've never done research before and I came up with this study by looking through the glossary of my cognitive psych textbook at the various terms and saying 'is there any way this theory could be relevent to schizophrenia? I need a thesis by Tuesday.' haha so if it seems a little extemporaneous, that's why. But I'm actually starting to think it's intrinsically worthwhile.
EDIT: Also is it probably ok to talk about my thesis in this much detail? I just rarely see people talking about their research projects in detail so I wanted to make sure there's no tacit rule against it or something. It's not like my idea is revolutionary and going to elicit theft, lol.
