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Men outscore women in mental rotation. Among the possible explanations for this result are gender stereotypes. Research has shown that instructions confirming or disconfirming the gender stereotype that men are more talented than women may affect performance in some spatial tasks, such as mental rotation, but research so far has shown inconsistent or null results. However, no research to date has assessed whether participants' implicit associations linking men to spatial abilities may modulate these effects. Thus, the goal of this study was to assess the moderating role of the implicit gender spatial stereotyping, that is the automatic associations between men vs. women and space, in male and female participants receiving either stereotypical (stating that men outscore women) or stereotype-nullifying (stating that there is no gender difference) explicit instructions. Results confirmed that men performed better than women in mental rotation, but also showed that in the stereotype-nullifying condition, the higher the automatic associations between space and men the lower men's performance. The discussion focuses on the importance of considering implicit gender spatial stereotyping as a factor that can modulate mental rotation performance.

The goal of the present study was to investigate the causal direction of influence between the ingroup as a whole and the self or another ingroup member considering a key feature of groups, i.e., their perceived meaningfulness. To this goal, in Study 1, 2, and 3 we predicted a preference for self-stereotyping and ingroup-stereotyping in the meaningful social categories of sorority women, left-handed people and psychology students. In Study 4 we further expect that the meaningfulness attributed to a group moderates the direction of causality between individual and ingroup perception. Thus, we used one's Zodiac sign as the ingroup whose degree of meaningfulness varies across participants and we hypothesized higher levels of meaningfulness attributed to the ingroup to be associated with higher self- and ingroup-stereotyping. Using the methodologically stringent Induction Deduction Paradigm, participants were given information on unfamiliar dimensions, about either the ingroup or an individual (self or other ingroup member) and asked to make inferences on those same attributes about the ingroup (induction condition) or the individual (deduction condition). As predicted, a preference for deduction to the self (i.e., self-stereotyping) and deduction to another ingroup member (i.e., ingroup-stereotyping) were found for the meaningful groups of sorority women, left-handed people, and Psychology students (Studies 1, 2, and 3). In Study 4, consistent with predictions, the higher the level of attributed meaningfulness to the Zodiac system the higher the degree of deduction both to the self (self-stereotyping) and to another Zodiac ingroup member (ingroup-stereotyping). Several implications of these results are discussed, for example in relation to the possibility of educational interventions aimed at invalidating intergroup differences.

Research suggests that exposure to social networking sites portraying a thin and often sexualized beauty ideal reduces young women’s body satisfaction, while exposure to body-positive content improves it. However, it is unclear whether sexualization could impair the beneficial effects of body-positivity messages. Young Italian women were exposed to one of three experimental conditions showing sexualized beauty ideals, sexualized body positivity, or non-sexualized body positivity that appeared either on Instagram (Study 1, N = 356) or TikTok (Study 2, N = 316). Across the two studies, results showed that, regardless of sexualization, exposure to body positivity increased body satisfaction and positive mood compared with pre-exposure measures, while exposure to sexualized beauty ideals reduced it. Participants in the sexualized beauty ideal condition also engaged in upward appearance social comparison whereas body positivity elicited downward comparison. Problematic social networking sites’ use moderated the effects of condition on body satisfaction, appearance social comparison, and positive mood, while downward comparison mediated the relation between condition and body satisfaction and positive mood. Our results highlight both beneficial and critical aspects of body positivity that should be taken into consideration when designing body image interventions and policymaking.