Tiffany A. Ito

Two studies were conducted to examine whether facial feedback can modulate implicit racial bias as assessed by the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Participants were surreptitiously induced to smile through holding a pencil in their mouth while viewing photographs of unfamiliar Black or White males or performed no somatic configuration while viewing the photographs (Study 1 only). All participants then completed the IAT with no facial manipulation. Results revealed a spreading attitude effect, with significantly less racial bias against Blacks among participants surreptitiously induced to smile during prior viewing of Black faces than among participants surreptitiously induced to smile during prior viewing of White faces.

In two experiments, event-related potentials were used to examine the effects of attentional focus on the processing of race and gender cues from faces. When faces were still the focal stimuli, the...

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.

The degree to which perceivers automatically attend to and encode social category information was investigated. Event-related brain potentials were used to assess attentional and working-memory processes on-line as participants were presented with pictures of Black and White males and females. The authors found that attention was preferentially directed to Black targets very early in processing (by about 100 ms after stimulus onset) in both experiments. Attention to gender also emerged early but occurred about 50 ms later than attention to race. Later working-memory processes were sensitive to more complex relations between the group memberships of a target individual and the surrounding social context. These working-memory processes were sensitive to both the explicit categorization task participants were performing as well as more implicit, task-irrelevant categorization dimensions. Results are consistent with models suggesting that information about certain category dimensions is encoded relatively automatically.

Facial muscle activity and self-reports were examined for racial bias in 3 studies. In the first 2 experiments, While participants imagined cooperating with a Black or White partner. Experiment 1 manipulated reward structure in the context of cooperating with a deficient partner. Experiment 2 manipulated partner deficiency and willingness to expend compensatory effort. On both facial EMG and self-report measures, joint rewards produced more negative affect than independent rewards. However, all partners were liked more when they were willing to try to compensate for their deficits. In addition, more liking was reported for Black partners, but EMG activity indicated bias against Blacks. Experiment 3 investigated individual differences in prejudice. Again, a greater preference for Blacks than Whites occurred on self-report measures, but in their facial muscle activity, high-prejudiced participants exhibited bias against Blacks.