Gendered Facial Cues Influence Race Categorizations

Damned if she does: The subordinate male target hypothesis and discrimination of social dominant female minority members

According to the subordinate male target hypothesis (SMTH), racism is based on an ethnicity-by-gender interaction, with a stronger link between experiencing racist discrimination and subordinate or dominant ethnic group status for men compared to women. This study reevaluates the SMTH, originally focused on objective discrimination, by applying it to self-reported active harm as a theoretically derived measure of racist discrimination and by exploring interindividual differences in female ethnic minority members' discriminatory experiences. We proposed that social dominance orientation (SDO) among female ethnic minorities would influence SMTH predictions. We tested this using multiple linear regression analyses among a sample of New Zealand Europeans as the majority in New Zealand and non-Europeans as the minority. As hypothesized, male non-Europeans reported disproportionally more active harm than female non-Europeans. Unexpectedly, not only female but also male, non-Europeans high in SDO reported more active harm than non-Europeans low in SDO. Therefore, applied to self-reported racist experiences, oppression of ethnic minorities is driven by interindividual differences rather than by gender. Together, these findings provide evidence that the SMTH cannot be unreservedly extended to reports of racist discrimination and that other processes may underlie these subjective experiences of discrimination that need to be considered in more detail.

Event-related potential correlates of implicit processing of own- and other-race faces in children

Human adults typically experience difficulties in recognizing and discriminating individual faces belonging to racial groups other than their own. The origin of this "other-race" effect is set in infancy, but the understanding of its developmental course is fragmented. We aimed to access the mechanisms of the other-race effect in childhood by unraveling the neural time course of own- and other-race face processing during a masked priming paradigm. White 6- and 7-year-old children (N = 19) categorized fully visible Asian (other-race) or White (own-race) target faces according to gender. Target faces were preceded by masked same-identity or different-identity prime faces, matching the target for race and gender. We showed an early priming effect on the N100 component, with larger amplitude to different-face pairs than to same-face pairs, and a later race effect on the N200 component, with larger amplitude to own-race face pairs than to other-race face pairs. Critically, race did not interact with priming at any processing stage (P100, N100, P200, N200, or P300). Our results suggest that race could have a temporally limited impact on face processing and that the implicit and unconscious identity processing of own- and other-race faces could be similar in 6- and 7-year-olds, depicting an immature other-race effect during childhood.

Intersectional Person Perception: A Scoping Review of Studies Investigating the Roles of Category Relationships and Cognitive Processes

This review considered experimental studies that used an intersectional framework in order to examine (1) how perceived relationship between the categories in a given intersection impacts the perception of its members and (2) how intersectional person perception has been studied through different cognitive processes. A systematic search in databases identified 5,393 records, and a screening processes resulted in 43 articles reporting 110 studies. The way intersectional targets were cognitively processed depended on contextual factors as well as on the perceived relationship between intersected identities (e.g., perceived [in-]congruence between identities). Less prototypical intersectional targets (e.g., Black gay men) sometimes experienced intersectional invisibility, facing both relative advantages (e.g., being less associated with certain negative stereotypes), and disadvantages (e.g., being overlooked, less recognized) compared to more prototypical members of their constituent ingroups (e.g., Black people, gay men). Future work should incorporate observed exceptions to these patterns and expand the cultural context of analysis.

Asymmetrical responding to male versus female other-race categories in 9- to 12-month-old infants

Faces can be categorized along various dimensions including gender or race, an ability developing in infancy. Infant categorization studies have focused on facial attributes in isolation, but the interaction between these attributes remains poorly understood. Experiment 1 examined gender categorization of other-race faces in 9- and 12-month-old White infants. Nine- and 12-month-olds were familiarized with Asian male or female faces, and tested with a novel exemplar from the familiarized category paired with a novel exemplar from a novel category. Both age groups showed novel category preferences for novel Asian female faces after familiarization with Asian male faces, but showed no novel category preference for novel Asian male faces after familiarization with Asian female faces. This categorization asymmetry was not due to a spontaneous preference hindering novel category reaction (Experiment 2), and both age groups displayed difficulty discriminating among male, but not female, other-race faces (Experiment 3). These results indicate that category formation for male other-race faces is mediated by categorical perception. Overall, the findings suggest that even by 12 months of age, infants are not fully able to form gender category representations of other-race faces, responding categorically to male, but not female, other-race faces.

You Play a Sport, Right? A Persistent and Pernicious Intersectional Bias in Categorization of Students vs. Student-Athletes

Black male students on college campuses report being frequently misperceived as student-athletes. Across three studies, we tested the role of perceivers' racial and gendered biases in categorization of Black and White students and student-athletes and the subsequent evaluative consequences. Participants viewed faces of actual Black and White male and female undergraduates who were either non-athlete students or student-athletes and made binary judgments about whether the undergraduate was a student or an athlete. We found an overall bias to judge Black male undergraduates to be student-athletes, driven by Black male students being more likely to be misperceived as student-athletes than White male students. Furthermore, male targets perceived to be student-athletes were rated lower on academic ability (Studies 2 and 3). In contrast, we found an overall bias to judge female undergraduates as students. Implications for how perceiver bias plays a dual role in negatively affecting academic climates for underrepresented groups are discussed.

Broadening the stimulus set: Introducing the American Multiracial Faces Database

Face-based perceptions form the basis for how people behave towards each other and, hence, are central to understanding human interaction. Studying face perception requires a large and diverse set of stimuli in order to make ecologically valid, generalizable conclusions. To date, there are no publicly available databases with a substantial number of Multiracial or racially ambiguous faces. Our systematic review of the literature on Multiracial person perception documented that published studies have relied on computer-generated faces (84% of stimuli), Black-White faces (74%), and male faces (63%). We sought to address these issues, and to broaden the diversity of available face stimuli, by creating the American Multiracial Faces Database (AMFD). The AMFD is a novel collection of 110 faces with mixed-race heritage and accompanying ratings of those faces by naive observers that are freely available to academic researchers. The faces (smiling and neutral expression poses) were rated on attractiveness, emotional expression, racial ambiguity, masculinity, racial group membership(s), gender group membership(s), warmth, competence, dominance, and trustworthiness. The large majority of the AMFD faces are racially ambiguous and can pass into at least two different racial categories. These faces will be useful to researchers seeking to study Multiracial person perception as well as those looking for racially ambiguous faces in order to study categorization processes in general. Consequently, the AMFD will be useful to a broad group of researchers who are studying face perception.

Workplace Anger Costs Women Irrespective of Race

The current research investigated the role that a person's race, gender, and emotional expressions play in workplace evaluations of their competence and status. Previous research demonstrates that women who express anger in the workplace are penalized, whereas men are not, and may even be rewarded. Workplace sanctions against angry women are often attributed to a backlash resulting from the violation of gender stereotypes. However, gender stereotypes may differ by race. The present study addressed this question using a between-subjects experimental design where participants (N = 630) read a vignette describing a new employee, which varied with respect to the employee's race (White, Black, Asian, and Latino/a/x), gender (male and female), and a prior emotional response (anger and sadness). Participants then evaluated the employee's competence and status. Findings revealed that men and women were both viewed as more competent when expressing anger relative to sadness, and this pattern did not differ across employee race. However, despite anger being associated with greater competence, women who violated stereotypes (i.e., expressed anger) were accorded lower status than stereotype-inconsistent (sad) men. Furthermore, exploratory analyses revealed that this pattern was consistent regardless of target and participant race. The current study replicates and extends previous research by employing an intersectional perspective and using a large, ethnically diverse sample to explore the interaction between gender and emotional expression on workplace evaluations across races.

Dynamic interactive theory as a domain-general account of social perception

The perception of social categories, emotions, and personality traits from others' faces each have been studied extensively but in relative isolation. We synthesize emerging findings suggesting that, in each of these domains of social perception, both a variety of bottom-up facial features and top-down social cognitive processes play a part in driving initial perceptions. Among such top-down processes, social-conceptual knowledge in particular can have a fundamental structuring role in how we perceive others' faces. Extending the Dynamic Interactive framework (Freeman & Ambady, 2011), we outline a perspective whereby the perception of social categories, emotions, and traits from faces can all be conceived as emerging from an integrated system relying on domain-general cognitive properties. Such an account of social perception would envision perceptions to be a rapid, but gradual, process of negotiation between the variety of visual cues inherent to a person and the social cognitive knowledge an individual perceiver brings to the perceptual process. We describe growing evidence in support of this perspective as well as its theoretical implications for social psychology.

Spatial and feature-based attention to expressive faces

Facial emotion is an important cue for deciding whether an individual is potentially helpful or harmful. However, facial expressions are inherently ambiguous and observers typically employ other cues to categorize emotion expressed on the face, such as race, sex, and context. Here, we explored the effect of increasing or reducing different types of uncertainty associated with a facial expression that is to be categorized. On each trial, observers responded according to the emotion and location of a peripherally presented face stimulus and were provided with either: (1) no information about the upcoming face; (2) its location; (3) its expressed emotion; or (4) both its location and emotion. While cueing emotion or location resulted in faster response times than cueing unpredictive information, cueing face emotion alone resulted in faster responses than cueing face location alone. Moreover, cueing both stimulus location and emotion resulted in a superadditive reduction of response times compared with cueing location or emotion alone, suggesting that feature-based attention to emotion and spatially selective attention interact to facilitate perception of face stimuli. While categorization of facial expressions was significantly affected by stable identity cues (sex and race) in the face, we found that these interactions were eliminated when uncertainty about facial expression, but not spatial uncertainty about stimulus location, was reduced by predictive cueing. This demonstrates that feature-based attention to facial expression greatly attenuates the need to rely on stable identity cues to interpret facial emotion.

At face value: Psychological outcomes differ for real vs. computer-generated multiracial faces

Multiracial research emphasizes hypodescent categorizations and relies on computer-generated stimuli. Four experiments showed that real biracial faces in a 2-Choice categorization task (White, Black) elicited hypodescent more than computer-generated faces. Additionally, Experiment 2 showed a 2-Choice categorization task with real biracial faces increased racial essentialism more than a 3-Choice categorization task. Experiment 3 showed that mere exposure to real biracial faces did not increase essentialism. Finally, Experiments 4a and 4b replicated hypodescent outcomes when comparing real biracial faces to computer-generated versions of those same faces. In sum, these findings initiate a discussion surrounding the methodology of multiracial categorizations.

Intersecting race and gender stereotypes: Implications for group-level attitudes

Two studies examined the relationship between explicit stereotyping and prejudice by investigating how stereotyping of minority men and women may be differentially related to prejudice. Based on research and theory related to the intersectional invisibility hypothesis (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), we hypothesized that stereotyping of minority men would be more strongly related to prejudice than stereotyping of minority women. Supporting our hypothesis, in both the United Kingdom (Study 1) and the United States (Study 2), when stereotyping of Black men and women were entered into the same regression model, only stereotyping of Black men predicted prejudice. Results were inconsistent in regard to South Asians and East Asians. Results are discussed in terms of the intersectional invisibility hypothesis (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008) and the gendered nature of the relationship between stereotyping and attitudes.

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

People can process multiple dimensions of facial properties simultaneously. Facial processing models are based on the processing of facial properties. The current study examined the processing of facial emotion, face race, and face gender using categorization tasks. The same set of Chinese, White and Black faces, each posing a neutral, happy or angry expression, was used in three experiments. Facial emotion interacted with face race in all the tasks. The interaction of face race and face gender was found in the race and gender categorization tasks, whereas the interaction of facial emotion and face gender was significant in the emotion and gender categorization tasks. These results provided evidence for a symmetric interaction between variant facial properties (emotion) and invariant facial properties (race and gender).

Using Groups to Measure Intergroup Prejudice

Implicit measures of racial attitudes often assess reactions to images of individuals to infer attitudes toward an entire social category. However, an increasing amount of research indicates that responses to individuals are highly dependent on context and idiosyncratic features of individual exemplars. Thus, using images of individuals to assess beliefs about a whole social category may not be ideal. Across three time points, we predicted that using images of groups would mitigate the influence of idiosyncratic features of individual targets and, thus, provide a better measurement tool to assess beliefs about a category to which all group members belong. Results revealed that an implicit measure that presented images of Black and White groups had greater construct validity, test-retest reliability, and predictive validity as compared with an implicit measure that presented the same exemplars individually. We conclude that groups provide a window into existing beliefs about social categories.

More Than Meets the Eye: Split-Second Social Perception

Recent research suggests that visual perception of social categories is shaped not only by facial features but also by higher-order social cognitive processes (e.g., stereotypes, attitudes, goals). Building on neural computational models of social perception, we outline a perspective of how multiple bottom-up visual cues are flexibly integrated with a range of top-down processes to form perceptions, and we identify a set of key brain regions involved. During this integration, 'hidden' social category activations are often triggered which temporarily impact perception without manifesting in explicit perceptual judgments. Importantly, these hidden impacts and other aspects of the perceptual process predict downstream social consequences - from politicians' electoral success to several evaluative biases - independently of the outcomes of that process.

Gendered race: are infants' face preferences guided by intersectionality of sex and race?

People occupy multiple social categories simultaneously (e.g., a White female), and this complex intersectionality affects fundamental aspects of social perception. Here, we examined the possibility that infant face processing may be susceptible to effects of intersectionality of sex and race. Three- and 10-month-old infants were shown a series of computer-generated face pairs (5 s each) that differed according to sex (Female or Male) or race (Asian, Black, or White). All possible combinations of face pairs were tested, and preferences were recorded with an eye tracker. Infants showed preferences for more feminine faces only when they were White, but we found no evidence that White or Asian faces were preferred even though they are relatively more feminized. These findings challenge the notions that infants’ social categories are processed independently of one another and that infants’ preferences for sex or race can be explained from mere exposure.