A Role for Emotion in Racial Categorization
Face recognition is one of the human species’ most complex, vital, and effortless cognitive functions. Although faces all look objectively quite similar, individuals have high acuity in discerning the fine visual details that distinguish one face from another. In fact, this extraordinary face perception ability requires so much computational power that multiple regions of the brain, including the inferior occipital gyrus and fusiform gyrus, appear to be dedicated to face perception (Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2001). This neural specialization speaks to the importance of face perception in humans’ longevity as a social species. Just by looking upon people’s faces, one can gain information about their …show more content…
Levin’s research found that, when asked to identify the race of Black and White faces, White participants were faster and more accurate when categorizing Black faces. Moreover, this research found 1) participants who were faster at classifying Black faces were poorer at recognizing faces and 2) perceptual expertise with Black faces impaired racial categorization. The extent to which participants to make swift racial categorizations, a factor that had an inverse relationship with facial recognition, was low in participants who were used to seeing Black faces. Altogether, these findings suggested that exposure to other-race faces reduces the ORE by preventing the process of racial categorization from competing with face …show more content…
They found positive affect could reduce the ORE to the point that White participants recognized White and Black faces equally well. In this study, participants were shown a sad, funny, or neutral video prior to either the encoding phase of a recognition task, while the target faces were being presented, or the testing phase, while participants identified the target.The researchers found that, while the negative video did not alter recognition of White or Black faces, the positive video improved recognition of Black faces. This dissociation between Black and White recognition changes led Johnson and Fredrickson to hypothesize that positive affect had a specific impact on Black recognition because positive emotions reduce outgroup categorization. Dovidio, Gaertner, Isen, and Lowrance (1995) found that when participants are happy, they are more inclined to see characters in a narrative as one superordinate group than to categorize the characters as members of disparate social groups. This study attempts to test the hypothesis that positive affect, much like how it decreases categorizations of people represented in narrative, can decrease racial categorizations of
Face recognition is one of the human species’ most complex, vital, and effortless cognitive functions. Although faces all look objectively quite similar, individuals have high acuity in discerning the fine visual details that distinguish one face from another. In fact, this extraordinary face perception ability requires so much computational power that multiple regions of the brain, including the inferior occipital gyrus and fusiform gyrus, appear to be dedicated to face perception (Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2001). This neural specialization speaks to the importance of face perception in humans’ longevity as a social species. Just by looking upon people’s faces, one can gain information about their …show more content…
Levin’s research found that, when asked to identify the race of Black and White faces, White participants were faster and more accurate when categorizing Black faces. Moreover, this research found 1) participants who were faster at classifying Black faces were poorer at recognizing faces and 2) perceptual expertise with Black faces impaired racial categorization. The extent to which participants to make swift racial categorizations, a factor that had an inverse relationship with facial recognition, was low in participants who were used to seeing Black faces. Altogether, these findings suggested that exposure to other-race faces reduces the ORE by preventing the process of racial categorization from competing with face …show more content…
They found positive affect could reduce the ORE to the point that White participants recognized White and Black faces equally well. In this study, participants were shown a sad, funny, or neutral video prior to either the encoding phase of a recognition task, while the target faces were being presented, or the testing phase, while participants identified the target.The researchers found that, while the negative video did not alter recognition of White or Black faces, the positive video improved recognition of Black faces. This dissociation between Black and White recognition changes led Johnson and Fredrickson to hypothesize that positive affect had a specific impact on Black recognition because positive emotions reduce outgroup categorization. Dovidio, Gaertner, Isen, and Lowrance (1995) found that when participants are happy, they are more inclined to see characters in a narrative as one superordinate group than to categorize the characters as members of disparate social groups. This study attempts to test the hypothesis that positive affect, much like how it decreases categorizations of people represented in narrative, can decrease racial categorizations of