Differential interactions between identity and emotional expression in own and other-race faces: Effects of familiarity revealed through redundancy gains.

Abstract

We examined relations between the processing of facial identity and emotion in own- and other-race faces, using a fully crossed design with participants from 3 different ethnicities. The benefits of redundant identity and emotion signals were evaluated and formally tested in relation to models of independent and coactive feature processing and measures of processing capacity for the different types of stimuli. There was evidence for coactive processing of identity and emotion that was linked to super capacity for own-race but not for other-race faces. In addition, the size of the redundancy gain for other-race faces varied with the amount of social contact participants had with individuals from the other race. The data demonstrate qualitative differences in the processing of facial identity and emotion cues in own and other races. The results also demonstrate that the level of integration of identity and emotion cues in faces may be determined by life experience and exposure to individuals of different ethnicities.

In‐group relevance facilitates learning across existing and new associations

“…Moreover, recent evidence revealed that in‐group biases are not limited to stimuli such as faces to which we are habituated and the effects can extend to more abstract stimuli (Moradi, Sui, Hewstone, & Humphreys, ). These findings suggest that although effects of in‐group favoritism can be driven by higher familiarity of the stimuli (Yankouskaya, Humphreys, & Rotshtein, ) under high saliency, in‐group relevance can potentially play a more important role in enhanced memory and attention to the in‐group stimuli.…”

Interference among the Processing of Facial Emotion, Face Race, and Face Gender

“…The symmetric interactions of invariant and variant face features and of invariant face features suggests that face race, face gender, and facial emotion are processed simultaneously and in turn influence participants’ decisions in emotion, race, and gender categorization tasks. Previous studies also showed that facial emotion could be simultaneously processed with identity and race, at least in individuals with more exposure to other ethnicities (Yankouskaya et al, 2014). …”

“…For example, individuals may not recognize facial emotions equally well for own and other races (Yankouskaya et al, 2014). Hence, we recruited additional 23 students from the same participant pool as in Experiments 1–3 to rate all faces on emotional valence on a 9-point Likert scale, with 1 = “unpleasant” and 9 = “pleasant”.…”

Coactive processing of sensory signals for in-group but not out-group stimuli

“…Our data indicate that this occurs for in-group but not out-group stimuli. Given that violations of nonindependent processing are more prevalent when features belong to a single compared with multiple objects (Mordkoff & Yantis, 1993;Yankouskaya et al, 2012Yankouskaya et al, , 2014, we argue that integration of the perceptual features of the stimuli is greater for in-group compared with out-group items (see also . An alternative account of redundancy gains was put forward by Miller and Ulrich (2003).…”