Examining Chinese undergraduates’ attitudes toward their parents with the Implicit Association Test

I used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine Chinese undergraduates’ implicit attitudes towards their parents, with the aim of establishing whether or not these attitudes differed according to whether the parent was the father or the mother and also whether the young person was male or female. Significant differences were found between participants’ implicit attitudes towards their fathers, compared with their attitudes towards their mothers, regardless of whether self-reference or other-reference was used. Participants perceived that they had greater intimacy with their mothers than with their fathers. There was evidence for gender dissociation under both other-reference and self-reference conditions.