Interactions of Visual and Auditory Information in Social Perception related to Gender and Ethnicity

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Melanie Caroline Steffens
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2009 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 69199027

The general aim of the current project is to test social perception, categorization, and impression formation related to gender and ethnicity with complex and ecologically valid stimuli that go beyond the presentation of labels or photographs only. Aim 1 is to follow up on key findings from the first funding period. Series of experiments will test with experimental paradigms, supplemented by event-related potentials, under which conditions expectancy violations determine impressions of speakers with dialects or foreign accents. Aim 2 is based on the idea that there is also non-chronic information that may be diagnostic and thus used for social categorization when crossed with ethnicity and gender information (wearing ethnically-associated headwear; powerful/powerless speech). Aim 3 is an extension of our proposal topic to a new research area. In a psychology-phonetics cooperation, we will critically test and follow up on the finding that information about individuals’ sexual orientation is manifest in phonetic speech characteristics. The relevant speech markers in German speech will be extracted (which will be an extension of existing findings from Anglo-Saxon speakers); they will be related to variables pertaining to speakers’ gender role orientation and respective social-group identification; and to the perception of sexual orientation in voices and voice-face stimuli. The ultimate aim of this project in relation to the entire research unit is contributing to the elaboration of person-perception models with regard to the integration of social-category information from different modalities.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1097: Person Perception
• Participating Persons: Dr. Tamara Rakic; Professor Dr. Adrian Paul Simpson