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Stereotype threat occurs when people are concerned about confirming a negative stereotype about their social group, and this often leads people to underperform within the threatened domain. Although this is well-documented, the majority of prior studies examining stereotype threat in older adults have focused on cognitive outcomes and comparatively less research has focused on how stereotype threat affects physical outcomes. In this study, we examined whether negative age-based evaluations invoke stereotype threat and adversely affect older adults' gait, and whether this depends upon the difficulty of the gait task and upon participants' evaluations of their own resources to cope with the demands of the gait task. To test this, we recruited 163 healthy, community-dwelling older adults and asked them to complete either an "easy" gait task (i.e., walking at their own comfortable pace) or a "difficult" gait task (i.e., walking within a 15 cm narrow base of support) along a 24' temporospatial-measuring walkway. This was done in either the presence or absence of a negative age-based evaluation. Results showed that the adverse effects of stereotype threat (i.e., walking slower, with relatively more variability in speed, and with more step errors) were generally limited to participants completing the difficult gait task who were not confident that they had sufficient resources to cope with the demands of the task. Thus, stereotype threat can impair older adults' physical performance, but the magnitude of this effect depends upon the task's objective difficulty and on participants' subjective evaluations of their own resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The effects of stereotype threat on older adults’ walking performance as a function of task difficulty and resource evaluations.