The purpose of the present study was to examine the time course of race and expression processing to determine how these cues influence early perceptual as well as explicit categorization judgments. Despite their importance in social perception, little research has examined how social category information and emotional expression are processed over time. Moreover, although models of face processing suggest that the two cues should be processed independently, this has rarely been directly examined. Event-related brain potentials were recorded as participants made race and emotion categorization judgments of Black and White men posing either happy, angry, or neutral expressions. Our findings support that processing of race and emotion cues occur independently and in parallel, relatively early in processing.Faces convey important social information that is useful for a variety of inferences. For instance, information about racial group membership and emotional expression can be informative about an individual's likely traits, attributes, and behavioral intentions (Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998;Brewer, 1988;Devine, 1989;Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg, 1999), and perhaps not surprisingly, extensive research has documented our ability to quickly and efficiently extract both types of information from faces ( Weike, Stockburger, & Hamm, 2004;Vanderploeg, Brown, & Marsh, 1987). While it is possible to consider how individual sources of information affect social inferences, such as how race affects evaluations, it is also important to consider the more naturalistic question of how multiple sources of social information are processed from faces. That is, we can consider how both race and emotion information are processed from the same face.Models of face processing suggest that information about social identity and emotional expression are processed separately and in parallel (Bruce & Young, 1986;Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000). According to Bruce and Young (1986), social category information such as age and gender and information regarding emotional expression are processed by functionally separate components of the face perception system. Moreover, these separable components are assumed to operate in parallel (see also Mouchetant-Rostaing & Giard, 2003), suggesting little interaction between the two types of information, at least in initial stages of perception. Haxby et al. (2000) have similarly argued that the perception of invariant,

As the racial composition of the population changes, intergroup interactions are increasingly common. To understand how we perceive and categorize race and the attitudes that flow from it, scientists have used brain imaging techniques to examine how social categories of race and ethnicity are processed, evaluated and incorporated in decision-making. We review these findings, focusing on black and white race categories. A network of interacting brain regions is important in the unintentional, implicit expression of racial attitudes and its control. On the basis of the overlap in the neural circuitry of race, emotion and decision-making, we speculate as to how this emerging research might inform how we recognize and respond to variations in race and its influence on unintended race-based attitudes and decisions.

Inferring the relative rank (i.e., status) of others is essential to navigating social hierarchies. A survey of the expanding social psychological and neuroscience literatures on status reveals a diversity of focuses (e.g., perceiver vs. agent), operationalizations (e.g., status as dominance vs. wealth), and methodologies (e.g., behavioral, neuroscientific). Accommodating this burgeoning literature on status in person perception, the present review offers a novel social neuroscientific framework that integrates existing work with theoretical clarity. This framework distinguishes between five key concepts: (1) strategic pathways to status acquisition for agents, (2) status antecedents (i.e., perceptual and knowledge-based cues that confer status rank), (3) status dimensions (i.e., domains in which an individual may be ranked, such as wealth), (4) status level (i.e., one's rank along a given dimension), and (5) the relative importance of a given status dimension, dependent on perceiver and context characteristics. Against the backdrop of this framework, we review multiple dimensions of status in the nonhuman and human primate literatures. We then review the behavioral and neuroscientific literatures on the consequences of perceived status for attention and evaluation. Finally, after proposing a social neuroscience framework, we highlight innovative directions for future social status research in social psychology and neuroscience.

Personal (internal) and normative (external) impetuses for regulating racially biased behaviour are well-documented, yet the extent to which internally and externally driven regulatory processes arise from the same mechanism is unknown. Whereas the regulation of race bias according to internal cues has been associated with conflict-monitoring processes and activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), we proposed that responses regulated according to external cues to respond without prejudice involves mechanisms of error-perception, a process associated with rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) activity. We recruited low-prejudice participants who reported high or low sensitivity to non-prejudiced norms, and participants completed a stereotype inhibition task in private or public while electroencephalography was recorded. Analysis of event-related potentials revealed that the error-related negativity component, linked to dACC activity, predicted behavioural control of bias across conditions, whereas the error-perception component, linked to rACC activity, predicted control only in public among participants sensitive to external pressures to respond without prejudice.

Uncertainty preferences are typically studied in neutral, non-social contexts. This approach, however, fails to capture the dynamic factors that influence choices of uncertainty in the real world. Our goals were twofold, to test whether uncertainty valuation is similarly processed across social and non-social contexts, and investigate the effects of acute stress on uncertainty preferences. Participants completed matched gambling and trust games under either control or stress manipulations. Participants not under stress exhibited no differences between money gambled and money entrusted to partners. In contrast, stressed participants exhibited increased gambling but decreased trusting behavior. We further found that irrespective of stress, participants were highly attuned to irrelevant feedback in non-social gambling contexts, believing that every incremental loss led to a greater chance of winning (gamblers’ fallacy). However, when deciding to trust a stranger, participants behaved rationally, treating each new interaction as independent. Stress compromised this adaptive behavior, increasing sensitivity to irrelevant social feedback.

Existing stereotypes about Black Americans may influence perceptions of intent during financial negotiations. In this study, we explored whether the influence of race on economic decisions extends to choices that are costly to the decision maker. We investigated whether racial group membership contributes to differential likelihood of rejection of objectively equal unfair monetary offers. In the Ultimatum Game, players accept or reject proposed splits of money. Players keep accepted splits, but if a player rejects an offer, both the player and the proposer receive nothing. We found that participants accepted more offers and lower offer amounts from White proposers than from Black proposers, and that this pattern was accentuated for participants with higher implicit race bias. These findings indicate that participants are willing to discriminate against Black proposers even at a cost to their own financial gain.

Those who are high in external motivation to respond without prejudice (EMS) tend to focus on non-racial attributes when describing others. This fMRI study examined the neural processing of race and an alternative yet stereotypically relevant attribute (viz., socioeconomic status: SES) as a function of the perceiver’s EMS. Sixty-one White participants privately formed impressions of Black and White faces ascribed with high or low SES. Analyses focused on regions supporting race- and status-based reward/salience (NAcc), evaluation (VMPFC) and threat/relevance (amygdala). Consistent with previous findings from the literature on status-based evaluation, we observed greater neural responses to high-status (vs low-status) targets in all regions of interest when participants were relatively low in EMS. In contrast, we observed the opposite pattern when participants were relatively high in EMS. Notably, all effects were independent of target race. In summary, White perceivers’ race-related motivations similarly altered their neural responses to the SES of Black and White targets. Specifically, the findings suggest that EMS may attenuate the positive value and/or salience of high status in a mixed-race context. Findings are discussed in the context of the stereotypic relationship between race and SES.

The largely independent neuroscience literatures on race and status show increasingly that both constructs shape how we evaluate others. Following an overview and comparison of both literatures, we suggest that apparent differences in the brain regions supporting race-based and status-based evaluations may tap into distinct components of a common evaluative network. For example, perceiver motivations and/or category cues (e.g., perceptual vs. knowledge-based) can differ depending on whether one is processing race and/or status, ultimately recruiting distinct mechanisms within this common evaluative network. We emphasize the generalizability of this social neuroscience framework for dimensions beyond race and status and highlight how this framework raises new questions in the study of prejudice-reduction interventions.