| Abstract: | There is evidence that the other-race effect is observed when individuals perceive emotional faces. However, it is not clear how emotional prediction influences the other-race?effect?in face recognition. The current study addressed this issue by employing a facial affective discrimination task. It was found that individuals displayed an inferior recognition performance with Caucasian (other-race) than Chinese (own-race) faces in both the unpredictable positive and negative condition. However, no such inferior recognition performance was observed in the predictable positive condition, although it was found in the predictable negative condition. These findings imply that the prediction of positive emotional faces, but not the prediction of negative emotional faces eliminates the other-race effect in?face recognition. In this respect, top-down emotional prediction might be thought of as an effective strategy of cognitive regulation that improves the inferior recognition performance for the visual stimuli involving relatively more feature-based processing. |
