1. Method Participants and Design Forty-nine female and 50 male undergraduate students from two different universities in the Southeastern United States participated in this study. Procedure Phase 1—Comedy Clips First, participants either watched and rated the funniness of either three sexist comedy skits and one neutral (non-sexist) comedy skit, or four neutral comedy skits. Sexist comedy skits portrayed women as sex objects whose value is derived from physical appearance, and depicted sexist stereotypes of women as inferior to men. Phase 2—Stroop Color Naming Task Second, participants completed the Stroop color-naming task-a measure of focused attention. Participants indicated as quickly as possible the font color of words (names of colors) appearing on the computer screen. Participants completed two blocks of 20 trials. First block- Non-interference trials (n=10): The name of the color (e.g., Blue) matched the font color (e.g., Blue). Second block- Interference trials (n=10): The name of the color (e.g., Red) did not match font color (e.g., Blue). Phase 3—Measure of Objectification Noll and Fredrickson's (1998) Self-Objectification Questionnaire (SOQ) was designed to measure trait self-objectification. Calogero and Jost (2011) modified it to measure state self-objectification. We administered Calogero and Jost's (2011) modified questionnaire. The Effect of Sexist Humor on Women’s Cognitive Processing Introduction Research on the social consequences of sexist humor has largely been guided by questions about how sexist humor affects men's responses to women (Woodzicka & Ford, 2010). Our study builds on these previous investigations by addressing the important question of whether exposure to sexist humor has consequences for how women perceive themselves. Many instances of sexist humor represent a powerful convergence of social cues that have been shown to induce state self-objectification in women. It directs their attention to how their bodies look as sex objects and expresses sexist ideology in a way that represents a socially accepted perspective for viewing the self. Accordingly, we conducted an experiment to test two hypotheses derived from objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). H1: Women, but not men, should experience greater state self-objectification upon exposure to sexist versus neutral humor. H2: Because state self-objectification disrupts focused attention, exposure to sexist humor should impair women's, but not men's, performance on a cognitive task requiring focused attention. Results State Self-Objectification As expected, women but not men reported experiencing greater state self-objectification in the sexist humor versus neutral humor condition. Cognitive Processing: Stroop Performance We computed a measure of cognitive performance time for each participant by subtracting the time taken to complete block 1 from the time taken to complete block 2 (block 2 - block 1). Supporting our hypothesis, women took significantly longer to complete the interference trials relative to the non-interference trials in the sexist humor condition than in the neutral humor condition. In contrast, for men, the difference in response time between the interference and non-interference trials did not significantly differ for men in the sexist humor condition and men in the neutral humor condition. Conclusions The results of our experiment make novel contributions to the literatures on self-objectification and the social consequences of sexist humor. First, we found that women uniquely experienced more state self-objectification following exposure to sexist comedy clips than exposure to neutral comedy clips. Second, results from the Stroop color-naming task showed that exposure to sexist humor created for women, but not men, short-term attention deficits. Thomas E. Ford 1, Julie A. Woodzicka 2, Astrid Pruitt 2, Shelbi Hendricks 2, Whitney Petit 1, Andrew Beveridge 1 1 Western Carolina University, 2 Washington & Lee