Benevolent sexism alters executive brain responses.

Benevolence is widespread in our societies. It is defined as considering a subordinate group nicely but condescendingly, that is, with charity. Deleterious consequences for the target have been reported in the literature.

Insidious dangers of benevolent sexism: consequences for women's performance.

Four experiments found benevolent sexism to be worse than hostile sexism for women's cognitive performance. Experiments 1-2 showed effects of paternalist benevolent sexism and ruled out explanations of perceived sexism, context pleasantness, and performance motivation. Experiment 3 showed effects of both paternalist and complementary gender differentiation components of benevolent sexism.

Social categorization and fear reactions to the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Two experiments were run in The Netherlands and Belgium 1 week after the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. The aim was to investigate whether social categorization affected emotional reactions, behavioral tendencies, and actual behaviors. Results showed that focusing participants' attention on an identity that included American victims into a common ingroup led them to report more fear and stronger fear-related behavioral tendencies and to engage more often in fear-related behaviors than when victims were categorized as outgroup members.

I feel for us: the impact of categorization and identification on emotions and action tendencies.

Building upon the social emotion model (Smith, 1999), we examined the combined impact of categorization context and social identification on emotional reactions and behavioural tendencies of people confronted with the victims of harmful behaviour. Depending on conditions, participants were led to categorize the victims and themselves in the same common group or in two distinct subgroups of the larger common group. We also measured participants' level of identification with the group that was made contextually salient.