Multiple cues in social perception: The time course of processing race and facial expression

Abstract

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,

A Foot in Both Worlds: Asian Americans' Perceptions of Asian, White, and Racially Ambiguous Faces

“…Like the P200, this component has also been associated with selective attention (Hillyard & Munte, 1984;Luck & Hillyard, 1994;Ritter et al, 1983;Wijers et al, 1989). Here, White participants have shown greater attention to ingroup White as compared to outgroup Asian and Black faces (Ito et al, 2004;Ito & Urland, 2003Kubota & Ito, 2007;Willadsen-Jensen & Ito, 2006). The different direction of effects in the N200 as compared to the P200 suggests a different psychological mechanism, and consistent with this, N200 amplitude has been associated with depth of processing across several different contexts.…”

“…This component has been associated with selective attention, with larger amplitudes associated with greater attention (Hillyard & Munte, 1984;Luck & Hillyard, 1994;Ritter, Simson, & Vaughan, 1983;Wijers, Mulder, Okita, Mulder, & Scheffers, 1989). Studies of race perception have consistently found greater attention by White participants directed to outgroup Asian and Black faces as compared to ingroup White faces (Ito, Thompson, & Cacioppo, 2004;Ito & Urland, 2003Kubota & Ito, 2007;WilladsenJensen & Ito, 2006). Based on the direction of this effect, and on other studies fi nding larger P200s to more negative stimuli (e.g.…”

Multiple group membership influences face-recognition: Recall and neurological evidence

“…ERPs derived from EEG have frequently demonstrated the degree to which perceivers automatically attend to (Bradley, 2009) and encode social category information (Ito & Urland, 2003;Kubota & Ito, 2007). A methodological advantage of this approach is high temporal specificity that allows for examination of processes occurring quickly and in succession; in the current experiment, categorization and attention to racial and university membership.…”

“…It is notable that the research showing improved recognition for partialingroup members has used race and university-affiliation as categorical dimensions (Cassidy et al, 2011;Hehman et al, 2010). Previous work has demonstrated the primacy and salience of racial categorization over other possible categorizations (Ito & Urland, 2003;Kubota & Ito, 2007;Willadsen-Jenson & Ito, 2006) and the difficulty in decreasing its salience (Shriver et al, 2008), and we hypothesized that race was a more powerful categorical dimension than universityaffiliation. Therefore, we expected to replicate previous research (Hehman et al, 2010) finding main effects of superior recognition of ingroup members over outgroup members on both racial and university dimensions, but that larger effect sizes would be demonstrated on the racial dimension.…”

Asymmetric neurocognitive representation of ethnic in-group/out-group faces

“…By contrast, the LPP over the frontal-centralparietal area was enlarged by the positive compared to negative affective link priming. As the N2 is larger to one's own face than to others' faces [16] and to famous faces than to unfamiliar ones [17] , the N2 has been associated with individuation and deeper processing of faces [18] . Thus our N2 results suggest that observers may carry out extensive processing or individuation of ethnic in-group faces in terms of affective links between the observer and target faces.…”