In two studies we disentangled and systematically investigated the impact of subtle facial cues to masculinity/femininity and gender category information on first impressions. Participants judged the same unambiguously male and female target persons-either with masculine or feminine facial features slightly enhanced-regarding stereotypically masculine (i.e., competence) and feminine (i.e., warm...

The goal of this study was to examine if masculinity is causally responsible for speeding in young men. Participants (83 males) were randomly assigned to a masculine, feminine, or neutral priming condition. Priming consisted in active listening to either masculine, feminine, or neutral words coming from the car radio while driving in a high-end driving simulator. Results showed that when the co...

Past research demonstrates that heterosexuals perceive gay men to have traditionally feminine characteristics. Guided by Social Role Theory (Eagly, 1987), we predicted that this stereotype would differ depending on a gay man’s specific social role. To test this idea, participants rated five gay targets (father, single man, hairdresser, truck driver, typical gay man) on stereotypically masculine...

Four experiments investigated the effect of grammatical gender on lexical access in Russian. Adjective-noun pairs were presented auditorily, using a cued-shadowing technique in which subjects must repeat the second word (the target noun), following adjectives that are either concordant or discordant with the noun's gender. Experiment 1 demonstrates gender priming with unambiguous adjectives and...

German pronouns (er(MALE/masculine), sie(FEMALE/feminine)) that refer to a person are determined by the biological gender (MALE/FEMALE) and/or syntactic gender (masculine/feminine) of the person. Pronouns (er(masculine), sie(feminine)) that refer to a thing are determined by the syntactic gender of this thing (Garten [garden]masculine, Tasche [hand-bag]feminine). The study aimed to investigate ...

The impact of exposure to media representations of aggressive, attractive, female protagonists on audiences' gender role expectations for women was explored through a laboratory experiment with 122 undergraduates from a large university on the west coast of the United States. Participants viewed a segment of a major Hollywood motion picture that featured a female protagonist who was either high...

Language interacts with olfaction in exceptional ways. Olfaction is believed to be weakly linked with language, as demonstrated by our poor odor naming ability, yet olfaction seems to be particularly susceptible to linguistic descriptions. We tested the boundaries of the influence of language on olfaction by focusing on a non-lexical aspect of language (grammatical gender). We manipulated the g...

The article demonstrates management discourse without masculine subtexts. In two organizations in the Norwegian state administration management was talked about either as a truly gender neutral activity or as a “feminine” activity. Managers’ primary tasks were to motivate team members and help them develop their capacities, it was stated. Further, team management was described either by the use...

Five experiments were conducted to investigate the interference between grammatical gender and false memory in German. In Experiment 1 (N=42), the feminine grammatical gender category served as the grammatical gender of the targets and lures, while the masculine occurred only in the lure words. The occurrence of feminine gender in both the targets and lures resulted in lower proportions of corr...