Implicit evaluations of faces depend on emotional expression and group membership☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.04.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • •

    Faces typically carry several evaluatively relevant aspects concurrently.

  • •

    Only few studies examined automatic evaluation of faces varying on two dimensions.

  • •

    Three high-powered priming studies examined this issue anew.

  • •

    Automatic reactions to fearful and happy in-group and out-group faces were assessed.

  • •

    Results show that both factors contribute to implicit evaluations.

Abstract

Faces carry a lot of information influencing evaluative reactions, such as emotional expression, age, or group membership. Even though, typically, many of these aspects will be present in a face concurrently, only few studies have examined automatic evaluative reactions to faces that vary on more than one dimension. As an exception, two recent priming studies examined the concurrent influence of group membership and emotional expression. Quite astoundingly, they leave the reader with two divergent outcomes: while Weisbuch and Ambady (2008) observed an interactive influence of emotional expression and group membership on evaluative reactions, Craig et al. (2014) found that group membership did not contribute to the implicit evaluation of positive and negative emotional expressions. In order to shed light on this matter, we conducted three high-powered experiments using prime images of highly relevant in-group and out-group members expressing happiness and fear. We furthermore varied the social context of the priming task in order to give the “interaction hypothesis” a chance. However, we found no evidence for the interaction reported by Weisbuch and Ambady. In contrast to Craig et al., we found that both emotional expression and group membership independently contributed to implicit evaluations. Differences are discussed in terms of relevance of the employed groups, test power, and the time-scale of underlying processes.

Section snippets

Overview

In three experiments, we used facial images of White-Caucasian and Middle-Eastern young men, showing a happy or fearful emotional expression. Group choice was based on previous findings that in Germany, men of Middle-Eastern appearance are evaluated more negatively than White-Caucasian men (e.g., Degner & Wentura, 2011; Degner, Wentura, Gniewosz, & Noack, 2007; Neumann & Seibt, 2001; Wagner, van Dick, Pettigrew, & Christ, 2003) and are associated with low warmth (e.g., Asbrock, 2010). Most

Experiment 1

In Experiment 1, we made group membership more salient compared to a standard evaluative priming task. Unlike Craig et al. (2014), who used a race-focused task, we enhanced salience by means of a group categorization task that preceded the evaluative priming task, in order to keep the priming task in its usual format.

Participants

Participants were 83 non-psychology undergraduate students (40 females, 43 males; age Md = 22.5 years, range: 18–32) from Saarland University, recruited on campus and via an electronic sign-up system. Participants received four euros for participation. Following the procedure outlined in Experiment 1, the data of seven participants were excluded because they were not German native speakers (n = 1) or White-Caucasian (n = 5), or because the rate of trials with response times in the range of 100

Experiment 3

Experiment 3 was a replication of Experiment 2 with two changes: First, we restricted the target word set to other-relevant adjectives. Second, and more important, we instructed participants to categorize targets from an other-relevant perspective.

Across-experiments analyses

To get a better indication of which between-experiments differences deserve further discussion, we conducted a 2 (group: Middle-Eastern vs. White-Caucasian) × 2 (emotion: happy vs. fearful) × 3 (experiment) mixed ANOVA, with the first two factors varied within participants and experiment as a between-participants factor, and priming scores as the dependent variable. The analysis yielded significant main effects of group and emotion, F(1,251) = 39.93, p < .001, ηp2 = .137 (dZ = 0.39; 95% CI

General discussion

We started with the observation that only few studies have examined how faces varying on more than one evaluative dimension influence automatic evaluative responses. Two recent articles that examined this issue (without directing participant attention to one of the two dimensions) left readers with conflicting conclusions. While Weisbuch and Ambady (2008) found evidence that group membership and emotional expression are instantaneously amalgamated in the evaluation process, the results of Craig

Theoretical implications for further research

Based on the accumulated evidence regarding the influence of emotional expression and group membership on evaluative processes, which conclusion can be drawn? Are emotional expression and group membership evaluated independently or do they interact? How can the results observed in our experiments and by Craig et al. (2014) be reconciled with those found by Weisbuch and Ambady (2008) as well as Paulus and Wentura (2014)?

Craig et al. (2014) proposed that top down influences might serve to explain

Conclusion

In three well-powered experiments, we examined the research question how faces varying on more than one evaluative aspect influence evaluative reactions. The results of all three experiments were clear-cut: group membership as well as emotional expression influenced reactions in an evaluative priming paradigm. However, no interaction between these two features emerged. Our results therefore show that fast and (potentially) involuntary reactions are influenced by various aspects of a face.

Open practices

The experiments presented in this article earned Open Materials and Open Data badges for transparent practices.

Materials and data are available at https://osf.io/9p6t5.

References (56)

  • P. Bourgeois et al.

    The impact of social context on mimicry

    Biological Psychology

    (2008)
  • J.T. Kubota et al.

    Multiple cues in social perception: The time course of processing race and facial expression

    Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

    (2007)
  • D. Wentura et al.

    Masked affective priming by name letters: Evidence for a correspondence of explicit and implicit self-esteem

    Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

    (2005)
  • F. Asbrock

    Stereotypes of social groups in Germany in terms of warmth and competence

    Social Psychology

    (2010)
  • Y. Bar-Anan et al.

    A comparative investigation of seven indirect attitude measures

    Behavior Research Methods

    (2014)
  • C.D. Cameron et al.

    Sequential priming measures of implicit social cognition: A meta-analysis of associations with behavior and explicit attitudes

    Personality and Social Psychology Review

    (2012)
  • N.C. Carroll et al.

    Priming of emotion recognition

    Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Section A

    (2005)
  • J. Cohen

    Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences

    (1988)
  • B.M. Craig et al.

    Emotional expressions preferentially elicit implicit evaluations of faces also varying in race or age

    Emotion

    (2014)
  • W.A. Cunningham et al.

    Implicit attitude measures: Consistency, stability, and convergent validity

    Psychological Science

    (2001)
  • J. Degner

    On the (un)controllability of affective priming: Strategic manipulation is feasible but can possibly be prevented

    Cognition & Emotion

    (2009)
  • J. Degner et al.

    Not everybody likes the thin and despises the fat: One's weight matters in the automatic activation of weight-related social evaluation

    Social Cognition

    (2009)
  • J. Degner et al.

    Automatic prejudice in childhood and early adolescence

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2010)
  • J. Degner et al.

    Types of automatically activated prejudice: Assessing possessor- versus other-relevant valence in the evaluative priming task

    Social Cognition

    (2011)
  • J. Degner et al.

    Hostility-related prejudice against Turks in adolescents: Masked affective priming allows for a differentiation of automatic prejudice

    Basic and Applied Social Psychology

    (2007)
  • S.C. Draine et al.

    Replicable unconscious semantic priming

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

    (1998)
  • K. Epstude et al.

    What you feel is how you compare: How comparisons influence the social induction of affect

    Emotion

    (2009)
  • F. Faul et al.

    GPower 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences

    Behavior Research Methods

    (2007)
  • R.H. Fazio et al.

    Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes: A bona fide pipeline?

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1995)
  • R.H. Fazio et al.

    On the automatic activation of attitudes

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1986)
  • J.B. Freeman et al.

    A dynamic interactive theory of person construal

    Psychological Review

    (2011)
  • C. Frings et al.

    Who is watching “Big Brother”? TV consumption predicted by masked affective priming

    European Journal of Social Psychology

    (2003)
  • B. Gawronski et al.

    Attentional influences on affective priming: Does categorisation influence spontaneous evaluations of multiply categorisable objects?

    Cognition & Emotion

    (2010)
  • A.G. Greenwald et al.

    Three cognitive markers of unconscious semantic activation

    Science

    (1996)
  • W. Hager et al.

    Emotionsgehalt, Bildhaftigkeit, Konkretheit und Bedeutungshaltigkeit von 580 Adjektiven: Ein Beitrag zur Normierung und zur Prüfung einiger Zusammenhangshypothesen

    Archiv für Psychologie

    (1985)
  • D.R. Herring et al.

    On the automatic activation of attitudes: A quarter century of evaluative priming research

    Psychological Bulletin

    (2013)
  • K. Hugenberg

    Social categorization ant he perception of facial affect: Target race moderates the response latency advantage for happy faces

    Emotion

    (2005)
  • K. Hugenberg et al.

    Facing prejudice: Implicit prejudice and the perception of facial threat

    Psychological Science

    (2003)

    • Cited by (8)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    ☆

    This research was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (WE 2284/14-1) to Dirk Wentura and Andrea Paulus.

    1

    Both authors contributed equally to this work.

    View full text
    © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.