About me
Gender Differences in Verbal Generation: A Study of Cognitive and Affective Flexibility
Location: East Ballroom
Mentor: Dr. Jennifer Britton
Flexibility in generating information is important in both cognitive and emotional domains. Performance on verbal fluency tasks, which require individuals to generate items within a specified category, vary by the type of category. However, it is unclear how gender differences and emotion regulation impact verbal fluency performance across domains. Understanding these relationships may provide clinical insights into gender differences in psychological disorders where individuals experience difficulties with thoughts and emotions leading to persistent anxiety and mood symptoms. A sample of undergraduate students (N = 154; 57.8% women; ages 18-22 years, M = 19.09, SD = 0.99) completed the Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) and a verbal generation task. Participants generated items within a category across domains (i.e., cognitive, positive, negative) for one minute and the average number of items generated was calculated. A repeated measures ANCOVA examined the effect of category, gender differences, and emotion regulation on task performance. Results indicated a significant main effect of category (cognitive > positive > negative; p males; p = .042). Although males scored significantly higher on the ERQ suppression subscale (p .05). These results suggest gender and emotional context should be considered when examining the relationship between flexible thinking and emotion regulation. Future studies should include clinical populations and more objective measures of emotion regulation to better understand these relationships.
