Automatic dehumanization across menstrual cycle

n the current study we address the role of hormonal fluctuations across menstrual cycle in female dehumanization of women and men. Using a sequential priming procedure in a lexical decision task, we test whether increased levels of conception risk lead to dehumanization of other women and men on both animal and human dimensions. Results showed that raise the question of whether hormonal shifts might also affect mate-attraction goal relevant processes␣␣Differently from Macrae' study, which has addressed gender-category accessibility across menstrual cycle, we here focus on the dehumanization processes (i.e., tendency of perceiving a given target as lacking of human qualities) during menstrual cycle phases. Specifically, in this study we take advantage of previous work by Piccoli and colleagues (2013), which shows that increased levels of explicit dehumanization of women as whole during the high conception risk phase is a product of the activation of women’s mate-attraction goal. Based on a sequential semantic priming paradigm in a lexical decision task (Blair & Banaij, 1996), we intend to investigate whether women automatically dehumanize other women, but not men, in the high, but not in the low conception risk phase. Method   Participants   Thirty-five normally ovulating female students from the University of Trieste participated in the current study. Procedure   Participants took part into a lexical decision task (see Blair & Banaji, 1996 for similar procedure).␣The task included two experimental primes ('woman' and 'man') and two control primes. Targets were 20 words: ten words were associated with animal concepts, and ten words were related to human concepts (for the material, see Viki et al., 2006). An equal number of non-words were included in the experiment. Results   Determination   of   conception   risk.   We relied on the forward-counting method (Gangestad & Thornhill, 1998) to define the day in which the experimental task took place during menstrual cycle (see, Piccoli et al., 2013). Lexical   decision   task. A differential score (i.e., correct target categorizations) was computed, subtracting individual reactions times for both the prime man and the prime woman to the individual average reaction times for the control primes. This differential score was calculated separately for human and animal words. Hence, positive scores that differed from zero pointed to accessibility, for word woman as the prime, animal words were more accessible in the high than in the low conception risk of the menstrual cycle; whereas human words were more inhibited in the high compared to the low conception risk. As for word man prime, no difference in terms of accessibility was found between the high and the low conception risk on both animal- and human-words. This study demonstrates that dehumanization of women is automatically elicited by menstrual cycle–related processes and associated with women’s mate-attraction goals.