Cognitive Gender Differences in Persian Monolinguals with Respect to Positive and Negative Linguistic Stimuli

Background and Aim: Among the many psychological differences between men and women, cognitive gender differences due to affective valence (i.e., whether an emotion is positive or negative) have long been of special interest to scientists. Despite such an interest, however, no study has ever compared the cognitive reactions of men and women to affective valence by manipulating the presence of positive and negative linguistic stimuli. Methods: The participants were ۴۳ university student monolinguals from different majors at the University of Gonabad, northeastern Iran. All participants were born and lived in Iran at the time of the experiment and spoke Persian as their native language. They reported using only Persian on everyday basis in both formal and informal contexts. Since the aim of the present study was to investigate the cognitive processing of affective linguistic stimuli, PsychoPy (version ۳) was used to design and perform a semantic decision task. In this task, participants see a pair of words presented one after each other (first, a noun and then, an adjective), and are asked to decide whether or not the target word is related in meaning to the preceding word. The stimuli consisted of a set of ۱۲۰ Persian nouns (۳۰ positive, ۳۰ negative, ۶۰ neutral) and ۳۰ Persian adjectives (۱۵ positive, ۱۵ negative) which were paired into ۱۲۰ noun-adjective dyads in this study. Half of the noun-adjective pairs were related in meaning and half unrelated in meaning. Using SPSS (version ۲۴), the ۳ (prime valence: positive, negative, neutral) × ۲ (target valence: positive, negative) x ۲ (gender: Male, Female) Mixed Factorial Repeated Measure ANOVA was run on reaction time and error rate with gender as a between-subject factor. Results: To deal with this issue, a cognitive experiment was specifically designed to look into the impact of linguistic context on affective word processing of Persian monolingual males and females. Conclusion Considering all of the conditions, women outperformed men in reaction time (Females: M=۸۶۷ms, SE=.۰۳۳; Males: M=۸۹۰ms, SE=.۰۳۳). However, men outperformed women in error rate (Females: M=۱۴%, SE=.۰۱۵; Males: M=۱۲.۵%, SE=.۰۱۵). The findings of the present study showed that the role of gender in affecting the cognitive mechanisms are complicated and cannot be easily attributed to either males or females. The current findings also emphasize the importance of considering gender as a potential factor modulating emotional processing of linguistic stimuli and its underlying mechanisms, and more broadly, the need to consider gender differences in understanding the cognition of emotion.

Keywords:

cognitive gender differences , affective valence , linguistic stimuli , semantic decision task , Persian monolinguals