Evaluate Schema Theory With Reference to Research Studies- L.O.


Schema- organizational frameworks in the mind
Categorize objects, events, and human practices in meaningful ways




Sandra Bem (1998)
Gender schemas and depression
Woman diagnosed with depression far more than men
Says that children need cognitive consistency
- Cognitive sensitivity means raising children without gender bias
 Encouraged children to play with a variety of toys
 Made sure children saw males and females doing the same jobs
 Restricted tv shows and books that they read so that they weren’t
exposed to gender-biased influences
 The Bems tried to convey that toys and jobs were gender neutral
 Message they wanted to convey to their children were that the only
thing separating men from women are their genitalia
Children create self categorizations in terms of what cultures value
Creates reference points about what it means to be male or female
Bem promotes raising children free of gender schemes
Aim: to prove how depressive symptoms may be related to cultural schemas about
how females are expected to express distress.







Methods:
- 48 participants characterized as being sex typed (having stereotypical
images towards gender) or non-sex typed
- viewed 61 randomly ordered words at 3-second intervals, such as animal
names, proper names, and clothing.
- Words have a gender schema of being associated as masculine or
feminine such as (feminine: shoes, Barbie dolls, etc. masculine: football,
wrestling, fighting, etc.)
- After presentation, participants wrote down as many words as they can
recall
Results:
- As hypothesized, male and female subjects recalled equal # of words, but
the order in which they were recalled depending on who was designated
as sex typed or non-sex typed
- Ex: sex typed participant recalling a feminine word would then go on to
recall a series of feminine words in clusters.
- Non- sex typed subjects used different clustering
Conclusion:
- Findings support notion that sex type people are more likely to create
categories based around gender
-


Relation to depression- sex typing creates interrelating oneself to the
gender schema
 As children learn contents of their society’s gender schema, they
learn which attributes are linked to own sex, and hence, with
themselves
 Creates expectations of depression, females may cause themselves
to become more vulnerable to having depression later in life as
they create gender schemas about how women are emotional and
are more depressive than men.
 Gender schemas related to how women experience stress
Advantage: Artificiality of experiment, controlled environment, limits extraneous
variables
o High internal validity
o High amounts of data standardization
Disadvantage: small sample- low population external validity
o Order effect- humans, when recalling long lists on info are most likely
to remember items in the beginning or the ends of lists affecting results
o Can be fixed using counterbalancing
 50% of subjects have one order of word lists, other half gets a
different order of the word list