Ensemble perception of emotion: Incidental effects of social identity.

Research in vision science suggests that people possess a perceptual mechanism-ensemble perception-which enables them to rapidly identify the characteristics of groups (e.g., emotion, sex-ratio, race-ratio). This work examined whether ensemble perceptions of groups are driven by the characteristics of group members whose behavior is most likely to impact the perceiver. Specifically, we predicted that more self-relevant group members would be weighted more heavily in ensemble perceptions than less self-relevant group members. Study 1 (n = 83) found that young adult participants' ensemble perceptions of emotion were biased in favor of more self-relevant (younger adult) group members' emotional expressions, compared to less self-relevant (older adult) group members' emotional expressions, and that these ensemble perceptions informed judgments of belonging in the group. Study 2 recruited older (n = 94) and younger (n = 97) adult participants and again found a general pattern of bias in favor of more self-relevant (younger adult) group members' emotional expressions in ensemble perceptions of emotion and that these ensemble perceptions informed evaluations of belonging in the group. Finally, Study 3 (n = 193) directly manipulated the self-relevance of older and younger adult group members and found that the extent of bias in ensemble perceptions of emotion depended on whether younger or older adults were made more self-relevant. Results suggest that incidental cues of social identity can bias ensemble perceptions of emotion and influence downstream judgments of belonging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Nonverbal expressions of status and system legitimacy: an interactive influence on race bias.

A voluminous literature has examined how primates respond to nonverbal expressions of status, such as taking the high ground, expanding one's posture, and tilting one's head. We extend this research to human intergroup processes in general and interracial processes in particular. Perceivers may be sensitive to whether racial group status is reflected in group members' nonverbal expressions of status. We hypothesized that people who support the current status hierarchy would prefer racial groups whose members exhibit status-appropriate nonverbal behavior over racial groups whose members do not exhibit such behavior. People who reject the status quo should exhibit the opposite pattern. These hypotheses were supported in three studies using self-report (Study 1) and reaction time (Studies 2 and 3) measures of racial bias and two different status cues (vertical position and head tilt). For perceivers who supported the status quo, high-status cues (in comparison with low-status cues) increased preferences for White people over Black people. For perceivers who rejected the status quo, the opposite pattern was observed.

The transmission of gender stereotypes through televised patterns of nonverbal bias.

One tacit assumption in social psychology is that people learn gender stereotypes from their environments. Yet, little research has examined how such learning might occur: What are the features of social environments that shape people's gender stereotypes? We propose that nonverbal patterns communicate intersubjective gender norms (i.e., what behaviors people value in women and girls vs. men and boys). Furthermore, we propose that children develop intersubjective gender norms in part because they are commonly and consistently exposed to these nonverbal patterns. Across three studies, we tested the hypotheses that (a) children are frequently exposed to a nonverbal pattern of gender-role bias in which people respond more positively to gender-stereotypical than counterstereotypical girls and boys and (b) emotionally perceptive girls extract meaning from this pattern about what behaviors others value in girls (traditionally feminine behavior) and boys (traditionally masculine behavior). Study 1 indicated that characters across 12 popular U.S. children's TV programs exhibited a small, but consistent nonverbal bias favoring gender-stereotypical TV characters. In Study 2, girls (N = 68; 6-10 years) felt more pressure to be feminine after viewing TV clips that included traditional nonverbal bias than after viewing clips that reversed this bias. As predicted, these results held only to the extent that children could accurately decode nonverbal emotion (i.e., were emotionally perceptive). Study 3 replicated these results (N = 91; 6-11 years). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Tough and tender: embodied categorization of gender.

Emerging evidence has shown that human thought can be embodied within physical sensations and actions. Indeed, abstract concepts such as morality, time, and interpersonal warmth can be based on metaphors that are grounded in bodily experiences (e.g., physical temperature can signal interpersonal warmth). We hypothesized that social-category knowledge is similarly embodied, and we tested this hypothesis by examining a sensory metaphor related to categorical judgments of gender. We chose the dimension of "toughness" (ranging from tough to tender), which is often used to characterize differences between males and females. Across two studies, the proprioceptive experience of toughness (vs. tenderness) was manipulated as participants categorized sex-ambiguous faces as male or female. Two different manipulations of proprioceptive toughness predictably biased the categorization of faces toward "male." These findings suggest that social-category knowledge is at least partially embodied.

Emotion contagion moderates the relationship between emotionally-negative families and abnormal eating behavior.

OBJECTIVE: To reconcile empirical inconsistencies in the relationship between emotionally-negative families and daughters' abnormal eating, we hypothesized a critical moderating variable: daughters' vulnerability to emotion contagion. METHOD: A nonclinical sample of undergraduate females (N = 92) was recruited via an advertisement and completed self-report measures validated for assessing: families' expressive negativity, daughters' susceptibility to emotion contagion, dietary restraint, and disinhibition, eating attitudes, and several control variables (interpersonal orientation, alexithymia, and the big five personality traits: extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism, and agreeableness). RESULTS: All variables and interactions were entered as predictors in a multistep multiple regression equation. Only an emotion contagion by family expressivity interaction term significantly predicted unhealthy eating attitudes (ß = .29, p = .02) and dietary restraint (ß = .27, p = .03). Negatively expressive families significantly induced unhealthy eating and restraint but only among young women susceptible to emotion contagion (ps < .05). DISCUSSION: Young women susceptible to emotion contagion may be at increased risk for eating disorders.

Emotional resemblance: Perception of facial emotion in written English.

Written language is comprised of simple line configurations (i.e., letters) that, in theory, elicit affect by virtue of the concepts they symbolize, rather than their physical features. However, we propose that the line configurations that comprise letters vary in their visual resemblance to canonical features of facial emotion and, through such emotional resemblance, influence affective responses to written language. We first describe our data-driven approach to indexing emotional resemblance in each letter according to its visual signature. This approach includes cross-cultural validation and neural-network modeling. Based on the resulting weights, we examine the extent to which emotional resemblance in Latin letters is incidentally processed in a flanker paradigm (Study 1), shapes unintentional affective responses to letters (Study 2), accounts for affective responses to orthographically controlled letter strings (Study 3), and shapes affective responses to real English words (Study 4). Results were supportive of hypotheses. We discuss mechanisms, limitations, and implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Unspoken cultural influence: exposure to and influence of nonverbal bias.

The authors examined the extent to which nonverbal behavior contributes to culturally shared attitudes and beliefs. In Study 1, especially slim women elicited especially positive nonverbal behaviors in popular television shows. In Study 2, exposure to this nonverbal bias caused women to have especially slim cultural and personal ideals of female beauty and to have especially positive attitudes toward slim women. In Study 3, individual differences in exposure to such nonverbal bias accounted for substantial variance in pro-slim attitudes, anti-fat attitudes, and personal ideals of beauty, even after controlling for several third variables. In Study 4, regional differences in exposure to nonverbal bias accounted for substantial variance in regional unhealthy dieting behaviors, even after controlling for several third variables.

Not so black and white: memory for ambiguous group members.

Exponential increases in multiracial identities, expected over the next century, create a conundrum for perceivers accustomed to classifying people as their own- or other-race. The current research examines how perceivers resolve this dilemma with regard to the own-race bias. The authors hypothesized that perceivers are not motivated to include ambiguous-race individuals in the in-group and therefore have some difficulty remembering these individuals. Both racially ambiguous and other-race faces were misremembered more often than own-race faces (Study 1), though memory for ambiguous faces was improved among perceivers motivated to include biracial individuals in the in-group (Study 2). Racial labels assigned to racially ambiguous faces determined memory for these faces, suggesting that uncertainty provides the motivational context for discounting ambiguous faces in memory (Study 3). Finally, an inclusion motivation fostered cognitive associations between racially ambiguous faces and the in-group. Moreover, the extent to which perceivers associated racially ambiguous faces with the in-group predicted memory for ambiguous faces and accounted for the impact of motivation on memory (Study 4). Thus, memory for biracial individuals seems to involve a flexible person construal process shaped by motivational factors.

Cultural Snapshots: A Method to Capture Social Contexts in Development of Prejudice and Stereotyping.

The scientific identification of how social environments transmit intergroup biases is a transparently complex endeavor. Existing research has examined the emergence of intergroup biases such as racial prejudice and stereotypes in many ways, including correlations between racial diversity and children's prejudice, content analyses of features in the media, or experiments testing the influence of selected variables with unknown prevalence in children's environments. Yet, these approaches have left unanswered how the social environments that children engage with cause them to acquire racial prejudice and stereotypes. We provide a review of the existing literature on socialization of racial prejudice and stereotypes and then present a methodological approach that can be used to quantify and test causal relations between the features of children's social environments and intergroup biases. We provide examples of how this method has and can be used alongside a discussion of unique considerations when applied to child samples.

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.

Rapid visual perception of interracial crowds: Racial category learning from emotional segregation.

Drawing from research on social identity and ensemble coding, we theorize that crowd perception provides a powerful mechanism for social category learning. Crowds include allegiances that may be distinguished by visual cues to shared behavior and mental states, providing perceivers with direct information about social groups and thus a basis for learning social categories. Here, emotion expressions signaled group membership: to the extent that a crowd exhibited emotional segregation (i.e., was segregated into emotional subgroups), a visible characteristic (race) that incidentally distinguished emotional subgroups was expected to support categorical distinctions. Participants were randomly assigned to view interracial crowds in which emotion differences between (black vs. white) subgroups were either small (control condition) or large (emotional segregation condition). On each trial, participants saw crowds of 12 faces (6 black, 6 white) for roughly 300 ms and were asked to estimate the average emotion of the entire crowd. After all trials, participants completed a racial categorization task and self-report measure of race essentialism. As predicted, participants exposed to emotional segregation (vs. control) exhibited stronger racial category boundaries and stronger race essentialism. Furthermore, such effects accrued via ensemble coding, a visual mechanism that summarizes perceptual information: emotional segregation strengthened participants' racial category boundaries to the extent that segregation limited participants' abilities to integrate emotion across racial subgroups. Together with evidence that people observe emotional segregation in natural environments, these findings suggest that crowd perception mechanisms support racial category boundaries and race essentialism. (PsycINFO Database Record

Influence of indirect information on interpersonal trust despite direct information.

Trust is integral to successful relationships. The development of trust stems from how one person treats others, and there are multiple ways to learn about someone's trust-relevant behavior. The present research captures the development of trust to examine if trust-relevant impressions and behavior are influenced by indirect behavioral information (i.e., descriptions of how a person treated another individual)-even in the presence of substantial direct behavioral information (i.e., self-relevant, first-hand experience with a person). Participants had repeated interpersonal exchanges with a partner who was trustworthy or untrustworthy with participants' money. The present studies vary the frequency with which (Studies 1 & 2), the order in which (Study 3) and the number of people for whom (Study 4) indirect information (i.e., brief vignettes describing trustworthy or untrustworthy behavior) were presented. As predicted, across 4 studies, we observed a robust effect of indirect-information despite the presence of substantial direct information. Even after dozens of interactions in which a partner betrayed (or not), a brief behavioral description of a partner influenced participants' willingness to actually trust the partner with money, memory-based estimates of partner-behavior, and impressions of the partner. These effects were observed even though participants were also sensitive to partners' actual trust behavior, and even when indirect behavioral descriptions were only presented a single time. Impressions were identified as a strong candidate mechanism for the effect of indirect-information on behavior. We discuss implications of the persistence of indirect information for impression formation, relationship development, and future studies of trust. (PsycINFO Database Record

Spatial cues influence the visual perception of gender.

Spatial localization is a basic process in vision, occurring reliably when people encounter an object or person. Yet the role of spatial-location in the visual perception of people is poorly understood. We explored the extent to which spatial-location distorts the perception of gender. Consistent with evidence that the perception of objects is constrained by their location in visual scenes, enhancing perception for objects in their typical location (e.g., Biederman et al., 1982), we hypothesized that people would see relatively greater femininity in faces that appeared lower in space. On each of many trials, participants briefly viewed a pair of faces that varied in gender-ambiguity. One face appeared higher than the other, and participants identified the 1 that looked more like a woman's face (Study 1) or indicated whether the 2 faces were the same (Study 2). Across 2 experiments, participants perceived greater femininity in faces seen lower (vs. higher) in space. These effects seem to be perceptual-changes to spatial location were sufficient for altering whether 2 faces looked identical or different. Thus, spatial-location modulates visual percepts of gender, providing a biased foundation for downstream processes involved in gender biases, sexual attraction, and sex-roles. (PsycINFO Database Record

Perceptions of variability in facial emotion influence beliefs about the stability of psychological characteristics.

Beliefs about the malleability versus stability of traits (incremental vs. entity lay theories) have a profound impact on social cognition and self-regulation, shaping phenomena that range from the fundamental attribution error and group-based stereotyping to academic motivation and achievement. Less is known about the causes than the effects of these lay theories, and in the current work the authors examine the perception of facial emotion as a causal influence on lay theories. Specifically, they hypothesized that (a) within-person variability in facial emotion signals within-person variability in traits and (b) social environments replete with within-person variability in facial emotion encourage perceivers to endorse incremental lay theories. Consistent with Hypothesis 1, Study 1 participants were more likely to attribute dynamic (vs. stable) traits to a person who exhibited several different facial emotions than to a person who exhibited a single facial emotion across multiple images. Hypothesis 2 suggests that social environments support incremental lay theories to the extent that they include many people who exhibit within-person variability in facial emotion. Consistent with Hypothesis 2, participants in Studies 2-4 were more likely to endorse incremental theories of personality, intelligence, and morality after exposure to multiple individuals exhibiting within-person variability in facial emotion than after exposure to multiple individuals exhibiting a single emotion several times. Perceptions of within-person variability in facial emotion-rather than perceptions of simple diversity in facial emotion-were responsible for these effects. Discussion focuses on how social ecologies shape lay theories. (PsycINFO Database Record

The relationship between self-esteem level, self-esteem stability, and cardiovascular reactions to performance feedback.

The authors examined the notion that individuals with unstable high self-esteem possess implicit self-doubt. They adopted the framework of the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat and assessed spontaneous cardiovascular reactions in the face of success versus failure performance feedback. Study 1 revealed predicted interactions between feedback condition, self-esteem level, and self-esteem stability, such that participants with unstable high self-esteem exhibited relative threat (a negative reaction) in the failure condition, whereas those with stable high self-esteem exhibited relative challenge (a positive reaction). Study 2 replicated these results and provided additional evidence against plausible alternative explanations.

Prior source exposure and persuasion: further evidence for misattributional processes.

To assess the persuasive impact of prior source exposure, two studies paired persuasive messages with a source to whom participants had previously been exposed subliminally, explicitly, or not at all. In Experiment 2, participants' attention also was drawn to information that potentially undermined the implications of any reaction to re-exposure. Compared to no exposure, prior subliminal exposure increased the source's persuasiveness, an effect not mediated by source liking. Explicit exposure increased source persuasiveness to the extent that the source was liked more and only absent a recall cue. Results favored misattributional accounts of prior exposure effects.

Fluid movement and fluid social cognition: bodily movement influences essentialist thought.

Rigid social categorization can lead to negative social consequences such as stereotyping and prejudice. The authors hypothesized that bodily experiences of fluidity would promote fluidity in social-categorical thinking. Across a series of experiments, fluid movements compared with nonfluid movements led to more fluid lay theories of social categories, more fluidity in social categorization, and consequences of fluid social-categorical thinking, decreased stereotype endorsement, and increased concern for social inequalities. The role of sensorimotor states in fluid social cognition, with consequences for social judgment and behavior, is discussed.

The pursuit of happiness can be lonely.

Few things seem more natural and functional than wanting to be happy. We suggest that, counter to this intuition, valuing happiness may have some surprising negative consequences. Specifically, because striving for personal gains can damage connections with others and because happiness is usually defined in terms of personal positive feelings (a personal gain) in western contexts, striving for happiness might damage people's connections with others and make them lonely. In 2 studies, we provide support for this hypothesis. Study 1 suggests that the more people value happiness, the lonelier they feel on a daily basis (assessed over 2 weeks with diaries). Study 2 provides an experimental manipulation of valuing happiness and demonstrates that inducing people to value happiness leads to relatively greater loneliness, as measured by self-reports and a hormonal index (progesterone). In each study, key potential confounds, such as positive and negative affect, were ruled out. These findings suggest that wanting to be happy can make people lonely.

The Nonverbal Transmission of Intergroup Bias: A Model of Bias Contagion with Implications for Social Policy.

Social and policy interventions over the last half-century have achieved laudable reductions in blatant discrimination. Yet members of devalued social groups continue to face subtle discrimination. In this article, we argue that decades of anti-discrimination interventions have failed to eliminate intergroup bias because such bias is contagious. We present a model of bias contagion in which intergroup bias is subtly communicated through nonverbal behavior. Exposure to such nonverbal bias "infects" observers with intergroup bias. The model we present details two means by which nonverbal bias can be expressed-either as a veridical index of intergroup bias or as a symptom of worry about appearing biased. Exposure to this nonverbal bias can increase perceivers' own intergroup biases through processes of implicit learning, informational influence, and normative influence. We identify critical moderators that may interfere with these processes and consequently propose several social and educational interventions based on these moderators.

Gender moderates the relationship between emotion and perceived gaze.

Recent evidence shows that gender modulates the morphology of facial expressions and might thus alter the meaning of those expressions. Consequently, we hypothesized that gender would moderate the relationship between facial expressions and the perception of direct gaze. In Study 1, participants viewed male and female faces exhibiting joy, anger, fear, and neutral expressions displayed with direct and averted gazes. Perceptions of direct gaze were most likely for male faces expressing anger or joy and for female faces expressing joy. Study 2 established that these results were due to facial morphology and not to gender stereotypes. Thus, the morphology of male and female faces amplifies or constrains emotional signals and accordingly alters gaze perception.