When people describe individuals of a different race, it is not uncommon to hear them exclaim, “They all look the same to me!” This colloquial phrase describes one of the more reliable empirical findings in face recognition: the own-race bias (ORB). Generally, people are less able to recognize and distinguish between people of a different race than to recognize and distinguish between people of their own race (
Meissner & Brigham, 2001;
Slone, Brigham, & Meissner, 2000). This recognition bias is prevalent among all racial groups (
Ng & Lindsay, 1994;
Teitelbaum & Geiselman, 1997), but some evidence suggests the effect is most pronounced for Caucasians viewing members of racial minority groups (
Meissner & Brigham, 2001). The prevalence of the bias has significant practical and societal costs. For instance, the ORB makes cross-racial eyewitness identifications highly unreliable and has dire consequences for the criminal-justice system (
Doyle, 2001;
Kassin, Ellsworth, & Smith, 1989).
The cognitive and social factors responsible for the ORB remain unclear (
Slone et al., 2000). Theories proposing that the degree of interracial contact should be negatively associated with level of ORB have been only weakly supported (
Chiroro & Valentine, 1996). A meta-analysis of 30 years of research has shown that interracial contact accounts for only about 2% of the variance in ORB across samples (
Meissner & Brigham, 2001). Although negative racial attitudes are correlated with limited interracial contact, no relationship has been found between the ORB and racial attitudes, whether explicit or implicit (
Ferguson, Rhodes, & Lee, 2001).
Recently, researchers have suggested that the ORB results from differences in the perception of own-race and cross-race faces (
Rhodes, Brake, Tan, & Taylor, 1989;
Tanaka, Kiefer, & Bukach, 2004). Generally, faces are recognized holistically; that is, a face is seen as a collective whole instead of a collection of parts (
Tanaka & Farah, 1993;
Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002). A classic demonstration of holistic face processing is the
inversion effect, in which turning a face upside down, and thereby changing its spatial configuration, dramatically impairs recognition of the face; in contrast, inversion has little impact on object recognition (
Farah, Wilson, Drain, & Tanaka, 1998).
Some evidence suggests that one reason for the ORB may be that cross-race faces are perceived less holistically than own-race faces (
Rhodes et al., 1989;
Tanaka et al., 2004). In essence, cross-race faces may be perceived more like objects.
Tanaka and his colleagues (2004) recently found that people rely on more holistic information for recognizing own-race faces than for recognizing cross-race faces. In addition, the inversion effect is more disruptive to recognizing own-race faces than recognizing cross-race faces (
Rhodes et al., 1989). Facial recognition has been localized to an area of the brain dubbed the fusiform face area (FFA;
Tong, Nakayama, Moscovitch, Weinrib, & Kan-wisher, 2000).
1 However, the FFA is less active in response to cross-race faces than own-race faces (
Golby, Gabrieli, Chiao, & Eberhardt, 2001), which again suggests that cross-race faces are perceived less holistically than own-race faces.
An additional explanation for the ORB is that when viewing cross-race faces, people focus more on cues of racial category than on cues of individual identity (
Levin, 2000;
Maclin & Malpass, 2003). Race is perhaps the most salient social category.
Montepare and Opeyo (2002) demonstrated that racial differences are detected faster than other social differences, such as gender, age, or emotional expression. Evoked-response potentials are about 50% faster responding to racial differences than gender differences (
Ito & Urland, 2003). People are also significantly faster at racially categorizing cross-race faces than own-race faces (
Levin, 1996).
Levin (2000) showed that an enhanced ability to categorize cross-race faces by race is correlated with an impaired ability to recognize cross-race faces; this finding suggests that the ORB occurs because encoding information about racial category interferes with encoding individuating information.
The role of racial categorization is also highlighted by
Maclin and Malpass (2003), who argued that the mere act of categorizing a face by race alters how individual facial features are represented in memory. For example, after categorizing a face as “African American,” one may remember the skin tone as darker than it actually was and facial features as more like a prototypical racial exemplar than they were. Maclin and Malpass concluded that the altered perception of cross-race faces due to the categorization process may underlie the ORB.
Even though the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, the ORB has proven to be a very robust psychological phenomenon, both prevalent and persistent (
Meissner & Brigham, 2001). One study did show that hours of intensive training could reduce the magnitude of the ORB, but the effect was short-lived, and 1 week later there was no difference between trained and untrained participants (
Lavrakas, Buri, & Mayzner, 1976). A new perspective on emotions, however, led us to test whether experienced positive emotions can reduce the ORB.
The benefits of positive emotions extend beyond the good feelings associated with them.
Fredrickson's (2001) broaden-and-build theory states that positive emotions are evolved adaptations that in the moment broaden a person's “thought-action” repertoire and over time build that person's enduring personal resources. Positive emotions may have long-term survival benefits by making people more open-minded and flexible, and ultimately better able to see and take advantage of more opportunities in the environment.
One aspect of the broaden-and-build theory, the
broaden hypothesis, predicts that positive emotions widen the scope of attention and literally enhance an individual's ability to see the “big picture” (
Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005). Several studies have demonstrated that positive emotions facilitate holistic attentional processes (
Basso, Schefft, Ris, & Dember, 1996;
Derryberry & Tucker, 1994). Studies investigating global versus local attentional processes have found that individuals with negative emotional traits, like anxiety, focus more on local elements, whereas individuals with positive emotional traits, like optimism, focus more on global elements (
Basso et al., 1996).
When positive or negative feedback is used to induce mood during global-local tasks, failure feedback produces a local bias, whereas success feedback produces a global bias (
Derryberry & Tucker, 1994). We have additional evidence linking positive emotions to more holistic perceptions. In one experiment, we showed that induced positive emotions produced global biases on a global-local choice task (
Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005). Recently, we found that the frequency of Duchenne smiles was positively correlated with faster reaction times to global relative to local targets (
Johnson, Waugh, Wager, & Fredrickson, 2004). Because one explanation for the ORB is weaker holistic encoding of cross-race faces than own-race faces (
Rhodes et al., 1989), we propose that positive emotion may reduce the ORB by facilitating holistic perceptions.
An additional prediction of the broaden-and-build theory is that positive emotions help to build social resources, perhaps by diminishing the salience of group differences. Positive affect is known to produce more inclusive categorization strategies, which increase perceived similarities between social groups (
Isen, Niedenthal, & Cantor, 1992). Dovidio, Isen, and their colleagues have found that induced positive affect promotes the use of more inclusive social categories and more superordinate group representations, making participants more likely to view each of their groups as part of one larger, all-encompassing group (
Dovidio, Gaertner, Isen, & Lowrance, 1995). Positive affect fosters a common in-group identity in which individuals are more willing to see “them” as “us” (
Dovidio, Isen, Guerra, Gaertner, & Rust, 1998). However, we do not know whether these more inclusive social categorizations also extend to racial perceptions. An intriguing possibility is that by promoting a common in-group identity, positive emotions could reduce the ORB by reducing the salience of racial differences.
Possible mechanisms aside, the present experiments were designed to test the initial hypothesis that positive emotions, relative to negative emotions or neutral states, reduce the ORB in facial recognition. Because recognition tasks require at least two stages, an encoding (learning) stage and a later recognition (testing) stage, we conducted a pair of experiments to examine the influence of emotions on encoding (Experiment 1) and recognizing (Experiment 2) pictures of Black and White people of both genders. Brief video segments were used to induce joy, fear, or a neutral state. Procedures for Experiments 1 and 2 were identical except for the timing of the emotion induction. In Experiment 1, we induced joy, fear, or neutrality prior to face encoding, whereas in Experiment 2, we induced these same states prior to the recognition test. We restricted our analyses to participants identifying themselves as Caucasian.
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