Affective divergence: automatic responses to others' emotions depend on group membership

Extant research suggests that targets' emotion expressions automatically evoke similar affect in perceivers. The authors hypothesized that the automatic impact of emotion expressions depends on group membership. In Experiments 1 and 2, an affective priming paradigm was used to measure immediate and preconscious affective responses to same-race or other-race emotion expressions. In Experiment 3, spontaneous vocal affect was measured as participants described the emotions of an ingroup or outgroup sports team fan. In these experiments, immediate and spontaneous affective responses depended on whether the emotional target was ingroup or outgroup. Positive responses to fear expressions and negative responses to joy expressions were observed in outgroup perceivers, relative to ingroup perceivers. In Experiments 4 and 5, discrete emotional responses were examined. In a lexical decision task (Experiment 4), facial expressions of joy elicited fear in outgroup perceivers, relative to ingroup perceivers. In contrast, facial expressions of fear elicited less fear in outgroup than in ingroup perceivers. In Experiment 5, felt dominance mediated emotional responses to ingroup and outgroup vocal emotion. These data support a signal-value model in which emotion expressions signal environmental conditions.     

Effects of situational power on automatic racial prejudice

This study examined the influence of situational power on automatic racial prejudice. White females anticipated participating in either an interracial or same-race interaction in one of two roles: superior or subordinate. Their racial attitudes were measured via the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Results revealed that both the racial composition of the anticipated dyad and participants’ situational roles influenced automatic racial attitudes. Specifically, whites assigned to the high-power role of a superior of a black individual revealed more racial bias than whites assigned to the lower-power role of a subordinate. By contrast, situational power had no influence on the automatic bias of whites anticipating same-race interactions. These results reveal the manner in which situational power hierarchies serve to reinforce existing social stratification. Implications for diversity efforts and attitude change are discussed.     

A dynamic interactive theory of person construal

A dynamic interactive theory of person construal is proposed. It assumes that the perception of other people is accomplished by a dynamical system involving continuous interaction between social categories, stereotypes, high-level cognitive states, and the low-level processing of facial, vocal, and bodily cues. This system permits lower-level sensory perception and higher-order social cognition to dynamically coordinate across multiple interactive levels of processing to give rise to stable person construals. A recurrent connectionist model of this system is described, which accounts for major findings on (a) partial parallel activation and dynamic competition in categorization and stereotyping, (b) top-down influences of high-level cognitive states and stereotype activations on categorization, (c) bottom-up category interactions due to shared perceptual features, and (d) contextual and cross-modal effects on categorization. The system's probabilistic and continuously evolving activation states permit multiple construals to be flexibly active in parallel. These activation states are also able to be tightly yoked to ongoing changes in external perceptual cues and to ongoing changes in high-level cognitive states. The implications of a rapidly adaptive, dynamic, and interactive person construal system are discussed.     

Misery loves company: when sadness increases the desire for social connectedness

In three experiments, the authors investigated the effects of sadness on the desire for social connectedness. They hypothesized that sadness serves an adaptive function by motivating people to reach out to others and preferentially attend to information related to one's current level of social connectedness, but only when it is instigated by social loss. Consistent with this hypothesis, the authors observed that sadness induced by an emotional depiction of social loss enhanced (a) attention to nonverbal cues, an important source of information concerning an individual's current level of social connectedness (Experiment 1), and (b) the desire to engage in social behaviors (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3 the authors found that sadness that results from imagined social loss uniquely produced this pattern of effects. Sadness that resulted from imagined failure had different effects on motivation and no effect on sensitivity to nonverbal cues. These results support and refine functional explanations for the universality of sadness.     

The 30‐Sec Sale: Using Thin‐Slice Judgments to Evaluate Sales Effectiveness

A successful sale depends on a customer's perception of the salesperson's personality, motivations, trustworthiness, and affect. Person perception research has shown that consistent and accurate assessments of these traits can be made based on very brief observations, or “thin slices.” Thus, examining impressions based on thin slices offers an effective approach to study how perceptions of salespeople translate into real‐world results, such as sales performance and customer satisfaction. The literature on the accuracy of thin‐slice judgments is briefly reviewed. Then, 2 studies are presented that investigated the predictive validity of judgments of salespeople based on thin slices of the vocal channel. Participants rated 20‐sec audio clips extracted from interviews with a sample of sales managers, on variables gauging interpersonal skills, task‐related skills, and anxiety. Results supported the hypothesis that observability of the rated variable is a key determinant in the criterion validity of thin‐slice judgments. Implications for the use of thin‐slice judgments in salesperson selection and customer satisfaction are discussed.     

Nonverbal "accents": cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion

We report evidence for nonverbal "accents," subtle differences in the appearance of facial expressions of emotion across cultures. Participants viewed photographs of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans in which posers' muscle movements were standardized to eliminate differences in expressions, cultural or otherwise. Participants guessed the nationality of posers displaying emotional expressions at above-chance levels, and with greater accuracy than they judged the nationality of the same posers displaying neutral expressions. These findings indicate that facial expressions of emotion can contain nonverbal accents that identify the expresser's nationality or culture. Cultural differences are intensified during the act of expressing emotion, rather than residing only in facial features or other static elements of appearance. This evidence suggests that extreme positions regarding the universality of emotional expressions are incomplete.     

Who's in Charge? Effects of Situational Roles on Automatic Gender Bias

Sixty European American male and female participants' implicit gender-related attitudes were assessed prior to engaging in a cross-gender dyadic interaction, according to one of three situational roles (superior, subordinate, or equal-status partner). Results revealed that the social roles affected male participants' gender attitudes. Specifically, male participants who anticipated an interaction with a female superior revealed negatively biased evaluative attitudes about women. By contrast, males who expected to interact with a female equal-status partner or subordinate revealed attitudes that were biased in favor of women. This finding highlights the importance of situational factors in the generation of implicit attitudes regarding social groups. Specifically, the present data point to the influence of situational status on males' attitudes regarding women. Implications of this work for integration and diversity initiatives are discussed.     

Us and them: Memory advantages in perceptually ambiguous groups

Ingroup advantages and outgroup deficits in perception and memory are well-established in research on race, gender, and other ostensibly identifiable social categories. The present study extended this research to a social category that is not as perceptually apparent: male sexual orientation. Consistent with hypotheses, an interaction of participant sexual orientation and image sexual orientation revealed an ingroup enhancement and outgroup deficit for memory of faces that participants perceived—both accurately and inaccurately—as belonging to either their ingroup or outgroup in a subsequent task. Additionally, parallel effects were found for the accurate identification of sexual orientation—a finding consistent with previous literature. The present data highlight the importance of social categorization for subsequent memory and suggest that the underlying cognitive machinery responsible for the recognition of groups may be co-opted for other relevant social applications.     

She’s Got the Look: Inferences from Female Chief Executive Officers’ Faces Predict their Success

Inferences from faces can predict success. This may be particularly important for women, who are often evaluated by their appearance. Here 170 northeastern U.S. undergraduates judged personality traits or leadership ability from the faces of all 20 U.S. Fortune 1,000: 2006 female chief executive officers (CEOs) and we compared these ratings to the same trait ratings made for male CEOs in a previous study. After controlling for cues important for female leaders (attractiveness, affect, age, and masculinity/femininity), ratings of competence and leadership predicted the amount of profits that the CEOs’ companies made and ratings of dominance predicted the amount of individual compensation that the CEOs received. CEOs’ success is therefore related to their facial appearance regardless of target and perceiver gender.     

Motions of the Hand Expose the Partial and Parallel Activation of Stereotypes

ABSTRACT— Perceivers spontaneously sort other people's faces into social categories and activate the stereotype knowledge associated with those categories. In the work described here, participants, presented with sex-typical and sex-atypical faces (i.e., faces containing a mixture of male and female features), identified which of two gender stereotypes (one masculine and one feminine) was appropriate for the face. Meanwhile, their hand movements were measured by recording the streaming x, y coordinates of the computer mouse. As participants stereotyped sex-atypical faces, real-time motor responses exhibited a continuous spatial attraction toward the opposite-gender stereotype. These data provide evidence for the partial and parallel activation of stereotypes belonging to alternate social categories. Thus, perceptual cues of the face can trigger a graded mixture of simultaneously active stereotype knowledge tied to alternate social categories, and this mixture settles over time onto ultimate judgments.