When under threat, we all look the same: Distinctiveness threat induces ingroup homogeneity in face memory

Dealing with declining dominance: White identification and anti-immigrant hostility in the US

Increasing diversity and the anticipation of its resulting cultural change is raising vociferous protestations among White Americans. Here, we explore moderation and mediation of its intergroup implications. Among a nationally representative sample of White Americans, Study 1 ( n = 2,257) revealed that living in a region that experienced a greater (vs. lesser) increase in racial diversity in recent years was associated with more anti-immigrant attitudes, but only among those who were highly White-identified. In an experiment, Study 2 ( n = 420, White Americans) revealed that collective nostalgia (i.e., longing for the ingroup’s past) mediated the relation between anticipated cultural change resulting from shifting demographics and anti-immigrant attitudes, but only for those who were highly White-identified. Thus, anti-immigrant sentiment among White Americans in response to changing demographics and culture is seen primarily among those personally invested in their White racial identity, an effect partly explained by a longing for bygone days.

Multiple producible cues do not aid face-name memory: A reverse production effect

Are there effective mechanisms that can be used to remember someone's name? The production effect is a phenomenon that exemplifies memory's robust benefit for studied words or phrases that have been spoken out loud, as opposed to only hearing or seeing them. However, this robust effect has not yet been identified for face-name pairings. The present study seeks to examine the boundary conditions of the production effect in face-name pairings by incorporating the additional cue of valenced adjectives. Participants were presented with facial images and a sentence stating the name and a description of the individual. Sentences were learned in one of four ways: saying the sentence out loud, reading it silently, reading it while hearing it, or only listening to the sentence presented while viewing the face. Memory for the face, name, and adjective combinations were tested using various types of cues: face only (Experiment 1a), or face and name or adjective (Experiment 1b & Experiment 2). Results replicate the lack of a production effect for face-name memory, and instead support a reverse effect for such stimuli. These findings indicate the unique processing of faces and highlight boundary conditions of the production effect.

Can anxiety and race interact to influence face-recognition accuracy? A systematic literature review

Wrongful convictions continue to occur through eyewitness misidentification. Recognising what factors, or interaction between factors, affect face-recognition is therefore imperative. Extensive research indicates that face-recognition accuracy is impacted by anxiety and by race. Limited research, however, has examined how these factors interact to potentially exacerbate face-recognition deficits. Brigham (2008) suggests that anxiety exacerbates other-race face-recognition deficits. Conversely, Attentional Control Theory predicts that anxiety exacerbates deficits for all faces. This systematic review examined existing studies investigating the possible interaction between anxiety and face-race to compare these theories. Recent studies included in this review found that both anxiety and race influence face-recognition accuracy but found no interaction. Potential moderators existing in reviewed studies, however, might have influenced their results. Separately, in some studies reviewed, anxiety induced during retrieval impacted recognition, contrasting with the conclusions of previous reviews. Recommendations for future research are given to address moderators potentially impacting results observed previously.

(Eye-) Tracking the Other-Race Effect: Comparison of Eye Movements During Encoding and Recognition of Ingroup Faces With Proximal and Distant Outgroup Faces

People experience difficulties recognizing faces of ethnic outgroups, known as the other-race effect. The present eye-tracking study investigates if this effect is related to differences in visual attention to ingroup and outgroup faces. We measured gaze fixations to specific facial features and overall eye-movement activity level during an old/new recognition task comparing ingroup faces with proximal and distal ethnic outgroup faces. Recognition was best for ingroup faces and decreased gradually for proximal and distal outgroup faces. Participants attended more to the eyes of ingroup faces than outgroup faces, but this effect was unrelated to recognition performance. Ingroup-outgroup differences in eye-movement activity level did not emerge during the study phase, but during the recognition phase, with ingroup-outgroup differences varying as a function of recognition accuracy and old/new effects. Overall, ingroup-outgroup effects on recognition performance and eye movements were more pronounced for recognition of new items, emphasizing the role of retrieval processes.

How We Perceive Others Resembling Us

Eye contact is essential for social cognition, acting as an important tool for social communication. While differences in face scanning patterns concerning familiarity have been thoroughly investigated, the impact of facial similarity on gaze behavior has not been examined yet. We addressed this topic by recording subjects' eye-directed gazing while looking at faces that were individually created systematically varying in terms of similarity to the self-face and familiarity. Subjects' self-faces were morphed into three other faces including a close friend of the same sex. Afterwards, they rated similarity to their self-face of those morphed face stimuli in a separate rating task. Our results show a general preference for the eyes' area as well as differences regarding fixation patterns depending on similarity to the self-face. The lower the similarity to the self-face, the more fixations on the eyes' area. Subjects' ratings followed a linear line, indicating well-pronounced face perception. Nevertheless, other faces were rated faster than the self-face independent of familiarity, while morphed faces got the slowest ratings. Our results mirror the importance of similarity to the self-face as a factor shaping the way we look at the eyes of others explaining variance apart from familiarity.

Racial Bias Increases False Identification of Black Suspects in Simultaneous Lineups

People are better able to correctly identify the faces of individuals who belong to their own race. Research linking the cross-race effect in face recognition to racial attitudes has been limited to explicit measures and sequential presentation formats. Using a simultaneous lineup task, our results from two studies revealed a systematic relationship between explicit racial bias and increased false identification of Black faces. We observed inconsistent evidence to suggest that individual differences in implicit attitudes impact judgments of Black faces. Nevertheless, nonconscious activation of crime-related concepts prior to encoding facial targets impaired White perceivers’ accuracy for Black faces. Nonconscious priming of crime concepts did not affect White perceivers’ judgments of White faces. Thus, among Whites, racial bias, as a function of both individual differences and contextual cues, can increase the false identification of Black faces in simultaneous lineups. Theoretical and legal implications for face recognition and eyewitness memory are discussed.

The Pitfalls and Promise of Increasing Racial Diversity: Threat, Contact, and Race Relations in the 21st Century

A decades-long trend toward greater racial and ethnic diversity in the United States is expected to continue, with White Americans projected to constitute less than 50% of the national population by mid century. The present review integrates recent empirical research on the effects of making this population change salient with research on how actual diversity affects Whites Americans’ intergroup attitudes and behavior. Specifically, we offer a framework for understanding and predicting the effects of anticipated increases in racial diversity that highlights the competing influences of intergroup concerns, such as relative group status and power, and more interpersonal experiences, such as positive contact, on intergroup relations. We close with a discussion of the likely moderators of the effects of the increasing national racial diversity and consider implications of this societal change for racial equity in the 21st century.

The neural basis of intergroup threat effect on social attention

Previous gaze-cuing studies found that intergroup threat is one of the modulators of gaze cuing. These findings indicate that intergroup threat would gate social attention by activating a network resembling that is thought to be involved in drawing or/and holding attention. The present study tested this hypothesis using a gaze-cuing task in which a particular in-group participants observed threatening out-group and nonthreatening out-group gazes, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. As expected, greater gaze cuing effect only emerged for threatening out-group when the in-group participants only felt inergroup threat from that out-group. Behaviorally, we found intergroup threatening out-group gazes did not draw attention faster than nonthreatening in-group gazes does. However, participants took more time to suppress the influence of the gaze direction of threatening out-group gazes, compared to nonthreatening in-group gazes, in the incongruent condition, which means intergroup threatening gaze holds attention longer than nonthreatening gaze does. Imaging results demonstrated that threatening cues recruited a fronto-parietal network, previously implicated in holding attention and execution functions. Our results, therefore, suggest that the mechanisms underpinning gaze cuing evolved to be sensitive to intergroup threatening stimuli, possibly because it is hard to disengage from such intergroup threatening cues once they are detected.

Increasing Intergroup Distinctiveness: The Benefits of Third Party Helping

Discrimination is often used to increase public perceptions of group distinctiveness. The current research studied the effectiveness of third party helping as an alternative, more benign strategy to this end. Across four studies, we examined whether helping a third party can position the helping group as more distinct from, or more similar to, a comparison group, depending on the nature of the comparison group's relationship with the third party. Results from three studies showed that third party helping was as effective as discrimination of the comparison group, but third party helping elicited a more positive public image of the group compared with discrimination. Study 4 provided evidence for the spontaneous use of third party helping in response to distinctiveness threat. These findings extend insights from classic balance theories and research on strategic intergroup helping to the domain of intergroup differentiation, and highlight a benign strategy to achieve positive group distinctiveness.

Intergroup threat gates social attention in humans

Humans shift their attention to follow another person's gaze direction, a phenomenon called gaze cueing. This study examined whether a particular social factor, intergroup threat, modulates gaze cueing. As expected, stronger responses of a particular in-group to a threatening out-group were observed when the in-group, conditioned to perceive threat from one of two out-groups, was presented with facial stimuli from the threatening and non-threatening out-groups. These results suggest that intergroup threat plays an important role in shaping social attention. Furthermore, larger gaze-cueing effects were found for threatening out-group faces than for in-group faces only at the 200 ms but not the 800 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA); the specificity of the gaze-cueing effects at the short SOA suggests that threat cues modulate the involuntary component of gaze cueing.

More Diverse Yet Less Tolerant? How the Increasingly Diverse Racial Landscape Affects White Americans' Racial Attitudes

Recent Census Bureau projections indicate that racial/ethnic minorities will comprise over 50% of the U.S. population by 2042, effectively creating a so-called "majority-minority" nation. Across four experiments, we explore how presenting information about these changing racial demographics influences White Americans' racial attitudes. Results reveal that exposure to the changing demographics evokes the expression of greater explicit and implicit racial bias. Specifically, Whites exposed to the racial demographic shift information preferred interactions/settings with their own ethnic group over minority ethnic groups; expressed more negative attitudes toward Latinos, Blacks, and Asian Americans; and expressed more automatic pro-White/anti-minority bias. Perceived threat to Whites' societal status mediated the effects of the racial shift information on explicit racial attitudes. These results suggest that rather than ushering in a more tolerant future, the increasing diversity of the nation may instead yield intergroup hostility. Implications for intergroup relations and media framing of the racial shift are discussed.

They’re All the Same!. . . but for Several Different Reasons

Researchers studying people’s perceptions of variability among members of social groups, or perceived group variability, have tended to focus on the ways in which perceivers’ group affiliations lead to in-group and out-group homogeneity effects, including the other-race effect. However, recent advances have highlighted the role of additional influences. In this review, we consider the influence of (a) the perceiver’s group affiliation, (b) the group’s objective variability, (c) the group’s social position, and (d) the group’s central tendency on trait dimensions. We focus on recent research in these areas that has highlighted the strategic, context-dependent, and symbolic nature of perceived group variability. We conclude that future research needs to adopt a multicausal approach in order to provide a more complete and comprehensive account of perceived group variability.

A social identity approach to person memory: group membership, collective identification, and social role shape attention and memory

Evidence indicates that superior memory for own-group versus other-group faces (termed own-group bias) occurs because of social categorization: People are more likely to encode own-group members as individuals. The authors show that aspects of the perceiver's social identity shape social attention and memory over and above mere categorization. In three experiments, participants were assigned to a mixed-race minimal group and showed own-group bias toward this minimal group, regardless of race. Own-group bias was mediated by attention toward own-group faces during encoding (Experiment 1). Furthermore, participants who were highly identified with their minimal group had the largest own-group bias (Experiment 2). However, social affordances attenuated own-group bias-Memory for other-group faces was heightened among participants who were assigned to a role (i.e., spy) that required attention toward other-group members (Experiment 3). This research suggests that social identity may provide novel insights into person memory.

Perception and Motivation in Face Recognition

Although humans possess well-developed face processing expertise, face processing is nevertheless subject to a variety of biases. Perhaps the best known of these biases is the Cross-Race Effect—the tendency to have more accurate recognition for same-race than cross-race faces. The current work reviews the evidence for and provides a critical review of theories of the Cross-Race Effect, including perceptual expertise and social cognitive accounts of the bias. The authors conclude that recent hybrid models of the Cross-Race Effect, which combine elements of both perceptual expertise and social cognitive frameworks, provide an opportunity for theoretical synthesis and advancement not afforded by independent expertise or social cognitive models. Finally, the authors suggest future research directions intended to further develop a comprehensive and integrative understanding of biases in face recognition.