The threat of appearing prejudiced and race-based attentional biases

The current work tested whether external motivation to respond without prejudice toward Blacks is associated with biased patterns of selective attention that reflect a threat response to Black individuals. In a dot-probe attentional bias paradigm, White participants with low and high external motivation to respond without prejudice toward Blacks (i.e., low-EM and high-EM individuals, respectively) were presented with pairs of White and Black male faces that bore either neutral or happy facial expressions; on each trial, the faces were displayed for either 30 ms or 450 ms. The findings were consistent with those of previous research on threat and attention: High-EM participants revealed an attentional bias toward neutral Black faces presented for 30 ms, but an attentional bias away from neutral Black faces presented for 450 ms. These attentional biases were eliminated, however, when the faces displayed happy expressions. These findings suggest that high levels of external motivation to avoid prejudice result in anxious arousal in response to Black individuals, and that this response affects even basic attentional processes.     

Attending to threat: Race-based patterns of selective attention

The present research investigated the extent to which the stereotype that young Black men are threatening and dangerous has become so robust and ingrained in the collective American unconscious that Black men now capture attention, much like evolved threats such as spiders and snakes. Specifically, using a dot-probe detection paradigm, White participants revealed biased attention toward Black faces relative to White faces (Study 1). Because the faces were presented only briefly (30-ms), the bias is thought to reflect the early engagement of attention. The attentional bias was eliminated, however, when the faces displayed averted eye-gaze (Study 2). That is, when the threat communicated by the Black faces was attenuated by a relevant, competing socio-emotional cue—in this case, averted eye-gaze—they no longer captured perceivers’ attention. Broader implications for social cognition, as well as public policies that reify these prevailing perceptions of young Black men are discussed.     

Controlling racial prejudice: social-cognitive goals affect amygdala and stereotype activation

The malleability of stereotyping matters in social psychology and in society. Previous work indicates rapid amygdala and cognitive responses to racial out-groups, leading some researchers to view these responses as inevitable. In this study, the methods of social-cognitive neuroscience were used to investigate how social goals control prejudiced responses. Participants viewed photographs of unfamiliar Black and White faces, under each of three social goals: social categorization (by age), social individuation (vegetable preference), and simple visual inspection (detecting a dot). One study recorded brain activity in the amygdala using functional magnetic resonance imaging, and another measured cognitive activation of stereotypes by lexical priming. Neither response to photos of the racial out-group was inevitable; instead, both responses depended on perceivers' current social-cognitive goal.     

Contextual moderation of racial bias: the impact of social roles on controlled and automatically activated attitudes

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that the social roles implied by specific contexts can attenuate or reverse the typical pattern of racial bias obtained on both controlled and automatic evaluation measures. Study 1 assessed evaluations of Black and Asian faces in contexts related to athlete or student roles. Study 2 compared evaluations of Black and White faces in 3 role-related contexts (prisoner, churchgoer, and factory worker). Study 3 manipulated role cues (lawyer or prisoner) within the same prison context. All 3 studies produced significant reversals of racial bias as a function of implied role on measures of both controlled and automatic evaluation. These results support the interpretation that differential evaluations based on Race x Role interactions provide one way that context can moderate both controlled and automatic racial bias.     

Facing prejudice: implicit prejudice and the perception of facial threat

We propose that social attitudes, and in particular implicit prejudice, bias people's perceptions of the facial emotion displayed by others. To test this hypothesis, we employed a facial emotion change-detection task in which European American participants detected the offset (Study 1) or onset (Study 2) of facial anger in both Black and White targets. Higher implicit (but not explicit) prejudice was associated with a greater readiness to perceive anger in Black faces, but neither explicit nor implicit prejudice predicted anger perceptions regarding similar White faces. This pattern indicates that European Americans high in implicit racial prejudice are biased to perceive threatening affect in Black but not White faces, suggesting that the deleterious effects of stereotypes may take hold extremely early in social interaction.     

They all look the same to me (unless they're angry): from out-group homogeneity to out-group heterogeneity

People often find it more difficult to distinguish ethnic out-group members compared with ethnic in-group members. A functional approach to social cognition suggests that this bias may be eliminated when out-group members display threatening facial expressions. In the present study, 192 White participants viewed Black and White faces displaying either neutral or angry expressions and later attempted to identify previously seen faces. Recognition accuracy for neutral faces showed the out-group homogeneity bias, but this bias was entirely eliminated for angry Black faces. Indeed, when participants' cognitive processing capacity was constrained, recognition accuracy was greater for angry Black faces than for angry White faces, demonstrating an out-group heterogeneity bias.     

The influence of social category cues on the happy categorisation advantage depends on expression valence

Facial race and sex cues can influence the magnitude of the happy categorisation advantage. It has been proposed that implicit race or sex based evaluations drive this influence. Within this account a uniform influence of social category cues on the happy categorisation advantage should be observed for all negative expressions. Support has been shown with angry and sad expressions but evidence to the contrary has been found for fearful expressions. To determine the generality of the evaluative congruence account, participants categorised happiness with either sadness, fear, or surprise displayed on White male as well as White female, Black male, or Black female faces across three experiments. Faster categorisation of happy than negative expressions was observed for female faces when presented among White male faces, and for White male faces when presented among Black male faces. These results support the evaluative congruence account when both positive and negative expressions are presented.     

Tracking the timecourse of social perception: the effects of racial cues on event-related brain potentials

Event-related potentials were used to track social perception processes associated with viewing faces of racial ingroup and outgroup members. Activity associated with three distinct processes was detected. First, peaking at approximately 170 ms, faces were distinguished from nonface stimuli. Second, peaking at approximately 250 ms, ingroup members were differentiated from outgroup members, with a larger component suggesting greater attention to ingroup members. This effect may reflect the spontaneous application of a deeper level of processing to ingroup members. Third, peaking at approximately 520 ms, evaluative differentiation of ingroup and outgroup members occurred, with greater ingroup bias displayed by those with higher levels of prejudice on an explicit measure. Together, the results demonstrate the promise of using neural processes to track the presence, timing, and degree of activation of components relevant to social perception, prejudice, and stereotyping.     

Brain activation while forming memories of fearful and neutral faces in women and men

Event-related functional MRI (fMRI) was used to assess brain activity during encoding of fearful and neutral faces in 12 women and 12 men. In a subsequent memory analysis, the authors separated successful from unsuccessful encoding of both types of faces, based on whether they were remembered or forgotten in a later recognition memory test. Overall, women and men recruited overlapping neural circuitries. Both sexes activated right-sided medial-temporal regions during successful encoding of fearful faces. Successful encoding of neutral faces was associated with left-sided lateral prefrontal and right-sided superior frontal activation in both sexes. In women, relatively greater encoding related activity for neutral faces was seen in the superior parietal and parahippocampal cortices. By contrast, men activated the left and right superior/middle frontal cortex more than women during successful encoding of the same neutral faces. These findings suggest that women and men use similar neural networks to encode facial information, with only subtle sex differences observed for neutral faces.     

Self-construal priming modulates neural substrates of self-awareness

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether self-construal priming can change adults' self-awareness induced during face perception. After reading essays containing independent or interdependent pronouns (e.g., I or we), participants were scanned while judging the head orientation of images showing their own and familiar faces. Neural activity in the right middle frontal cortex was greater when participants viewed their own rather than familiar faces, and this difference was larger after independent than after interdependent self-construal priming. The increased right frontal activity for participants' own faces relative to familiar faces was associated with faster responses. Our findings suggest that the neural correlates of self-awareness associated with recognition of one's own face can be modulated by self-construal priming in human adults.     

Contextual Variation in Automatic Evaluative Bias to Racially-Ambiguous Faces

Three studies examined the implicit evaluative associations activated by racially-ambiguous Black-White faces. In the context of both Black and White faces, Study 1 revealed a graded pattern of bias against racially-ambiguous faces that was weaker than the bias to Black faces but stronger than that to White faces. Study 2 showed that significant bias was present when racially-ambiguous faces appeared in the context of only White faces, but not in the context of only Black faces. Study 3 demonstrated that context produces perceptual contrast effects on racial-prototypicality judgments. Racially-ambiguous faces were perceived as more prototypically Black in a White-only than mixed-race context, and less prototypically Black in a Black-only context. Conversely, they were seen as more prototypically White in a Black-only than mixed context, and less prototypically White in a White-only context. The studies suggest that both race-related featural properties within a face (i.e., racial ambiguity) and external contextual factors affect automatic evaluative associations.     

The neural correlates of statistical learning in a word segmentation task: An fMRI study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to assess neural activation as participants learned to segment continuous streams of speech containing syllable sequences varying in their transitional probabilities. Speech streams were presented in four runs, each followed by a behavioral test to measure the extent of learning over time. Behavioral performance indicated that participants could discriminate statistically coherent sequences (words) from less coherent sequences (partwords). Individual rates of learning, defined as the difference in ratings for words and partwords, were used as predictors of neural activation to ask which brain areas showed activity associated with these measures. Results showed significant activity in the pars opercularis and pars triangularis regions of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). The relationship between these findings and prior work on the neural basis of statistical learning is discussed, and parallels to the frontal/subcortical network involved in other forms of implicit sequence learning are considered.     

Brain dynamics associated with face-naming and the tip-of-the-tongue state

Active brain areas and their temporal sequence of activation during the successful retrieval and naming of famous faces (KNOW) and during the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state were studied by means of low resolution electromagnetic tomographic analysis (LORETA) applied to event-related potentials. The results provide evidence that adequate activation of a neural network during the first 500 ms following presentation of the photograph--mainly involving the posterior temporal region, the insula, lateral and medial prefrontal areas and the medial temporal lobe--is associated with successful retrieval of lexical-phonological information about the person's name. Significant differences between conditions were observed in the 538-698-ms interval; specifically there was greater activation of the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC) towards the supplementary motor area (SMA) in the KNOW than in the TOT condition, possibly in relation to the motor response and as a consequence of the successful retrieval of lexical-phonological information about the person.     

Selective attention to angry faces in clinical social phobia

This study investigated the time course of attentional responses to emotional facial expressions in a clinical sample with social phobia. With a visual probe task, photographs of angry, happy, and neutral faces were presented at 2 exposure durations: 500 and 1250 ms. At 500 ms, the social phobia group showed enhanced vigilance for angry faces, relative to happy and neutral faces, in comparison with normal controls. In the 1250-ms condition, there were no significant attentional biases in the social phobia group. Results are consistent with a bias in initial orienting to threat cues in social anxiety. Findings are discussed in relation to recent cognitive models of anxiety disorders.     

Neural components of social evaluation

Evaluative responses appear to involve 2 seemingly distinct sets of processes: those that are automatically activated and others that are more consciously controlled. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the authors investigated the brain systems associated with automatic and controlled evaluative processing. Participants made either evaluative (good-bad) or nonevaluative (past-present) judgments about famous names. Greater amygdala activity was observed for names rated as "bad" relative to those rated as "good," regardless of whether the task directly involved an evaluative judgment (good-bad) or not (past-present). Good-bad judgments resulted in greater medial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity than past-present judgments. Furthermore, there was greater ventrolateral PFC activity in good-bad judgments marked by greater ambivalence. Together, these findings indicate a neural distinction between processes engaged for automatic and controlled evaluation. Whereas automatic processes are sensitive to simple valence, controlled processes are sensitive to attitudinal complexity.     

Prejudice and perception: the role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon

Two experiments used a priming paradigm to investigate the influence of racial cues on the perceptual identification of weapons. In Experiment 1, participants identified guns faster when primed with Black faces compared with White faces. In Experiment 2, participants were required to respond quickly, causing the racial bias to shift from reaction time to accuracy. Participants misidentified tools as guns more often when primed with a Black face than with a White face. L. L. Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure was applied to demonstrate that racial primes influenced automatic (A) processing, but not controlled (C) processing. The response deadline reduced the C estimate but not the A estimate. The motivation to control prejudice moderated the relationship between explicit prejudice and automatic bias. Implications are discussed on applied and theoretical levels.     

Intergroup anxiety effects on the control of racial stereotypes: A psychoneuroendocrine analysis

Anxiety associated with an intergroup interaction is often thought to interfere with the cognitive control of automatic racial stereotypes. However, this link remains elusive, as self-reported anxiety is not typically associated with assessments of control. The present research tested a neuroendocrine model for how intergroup anxiety may affect controlled processing. White participants met with a Black or White interviewer to discuss their racial attitudes and to complete a measure of stereotype inhibition. Baseline and post-interaction assessments of self-reported anxiety and salivary cortisol were obtained. Although self-reported anxiety was heightened for participants in the Black interviewer condition, it was not associated with control on the stereotyping task. Rather, greater cortisol reactivity to the interracial interaction predicted reduced controlled processing. This pattern was not observed in the White interviewer condition. Implications for theories of intergroup anxiety, self-regulation, and resource depletion are discussed.     

The company you keep: Fear of rejection in intergroup interaction

People use many cues to infer the likelihood of acceptance or rejection in intergroup interactions. Nearly all prior research has focused on personal cues directly given off by the potential interaction partner (e.g., eye contact and smiling). However, we argue that in the context of intergroup interactions, individuals may be especially sensitive to broader social cues, such as an interaction partner's social network. Across three experiments we explored differences in White participants' evaluations of a smiling Black man presented with a Black or White friend. When this Black man was featured with a Black friend, White participants reported greater rejection concerns and a greater inclination to reject this Black man compared to when he was featured with a White friend (Experiments 1-3) or featured alone (Experiment 2). Furthermore, when participants received a simple intervention designed to buffer against social rejection, the race of the Black man's friend no longer influenced participants' interests in befriending the Black man (Experiment 3). This research demonstrates the power of friendships in interracial interactions and provides evidence for a simple intervention to reduce the weight of rejection concerns in interracial interactions.     

Links between rapid ERP responses to fearful faces and conscious awareness

To study links between rapid ERP responses to fearful faces and conscious awareness, a backward‐masking paradigm was employed where fearful or neutral target faces were presented for different durations and were followed by a neutral face mask. Participants had to report target face expression on each trial. When masked faces were clearly visible (200 ms duration), an early frontal positivity, a later more broadly distributed positivity, and a temporo‐occipital negativity were elicited by fearful relative to neutral faces, confirming findings from previous studies with unmasked faces. These emotion‐specific effects were also triggered when masked faces were presented for only 17 ms, but only on trials where fearful faces were successfully detected. When masked faces were shown for 50 ms, a smaller but reliable frontal positivity was also elicited by undetected fearful faces. These results demonstrate that early ERP responses to fearful faces are linked to observers' subjective conscious awareness of such faces, as reflected by their perceptual reports. They suggest that frontal brain regions involved in the construction of conscious representations of facial expression are activated at very short latencies.     

A dynamic model of guilt: implications for motivation and self-regulation in the context of prejudice

Guilt is widely recognized as an important self-regulatory emotion, yet alternative theoretical accounts view guilt primarily as either a punishment cue or a prosocial motivator. Integrating these views, we propose that guilt functions dynamically to first provide a negative reinforcement cue associated with reduced approach motivation, which transforms into approach-motivated behavior when an opportunity for reparation presents itself. We tested this hypothesis in the context of racial prejudice. White subjects viewed a multiracial series of faces while cortical activity was recorded using electroencephalography. Following bogus feedback indicating anti-Black responses, subjects reported elevated guilt, which was associated with changes in frontal cortical asymmetry indicating reduced approach motivation. When subjects were presented with an opportunity to engage in prejudice-reducing behavior, guilt predicted greater interest in prejudice reduction, which in turn was associated with an approach-related shift in frontal asymmetry. The results support a dynamic model in which guilt is associated with adaptive changes in motivation and behavior.