Date of Award

6-2013

Document Type

Open Access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

George Bizer

Language

English

Keywords

gender, authors, perception, literature, emotions

Abstract

Previous research suggests that gender acknowledgment yields significant consequences on subsequent judgments. In the current research, we examined whether gender of authorial names affected the perception of literary quality. Participants read a short story excerpt designated as male‐authored or female‐authored that contained either exaggerated emotional content or minimal emotional content. Following presentation of the passage, participants reported perceived quality and emotionality and then completed the 10-item short form of the Need for Affect Questionnaire (NAQ-S; cf. Maio & Esses, 2001) followed by the 18‐item Need for Cognition Scale (Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao 1984). Results indicated that participants rated female authors higher in quality than male authors when reading a highly emotional passage. When reading a minimally emotional passage, there was no difference in rating based on author gender. My research thus suggests that individuals may implicitly judge source type based on gender in conjunction with perceived emotionality and allow stereotypes to influence their judgments of quality, providing interesting implications for female authors and publishers.

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