Facial race and sex cues have a comparable influence on emotion recognition in Chinese and Australian participants

Abstract

The magnitude of the happy categorisation advantage, the faster recognition of happiness than negative expressions, is influenced by facial race and sex cues. Previous studies have investigated these relationships using racial outgroups stereotypically associated with physical threat in predominantly Caucasian samples. To determine whether these influences generalise to stimuli representing other ethnic groups and to participants of different ethnicities, Caucasian Australian (Experiments 1 and 2) and Chinese participants (Experiment 2) categorised happy and angry expressions displayed on own-race male faces presented with emotional other-race male, own-race female, and other-race female faces in separate tasks. The influence of social category cues on the happy categorisation advantage was similar in the Australian and Chinese samples. In both samples, the happy categorisation advantage was present for own-race male faces when they were encountered with other-race male faces but reduced when own-race male faces were categorised along with female faces. The happy categorisation advantage was present for own-race and other-race female faces when they were encountered with own-race male faces in both samples. Results suggest similarity in the influence of social category cues on emotion categorisation.

2:0 for the good guys: Character information influences emotion perception.

“…As mentioned above, previous studies of the effect of social category cues on emotion perception cannot completely rule out stimulus artifacts as the faces used are evaluated more or less positively based on interpretation of facial cues. For instance, it is possible that the way females express emotions differs from males or that structural differences between female and male, or own- and other-race faces introduce the observed bias in emotion perception (although see Craig, Koch, & Lipp, 2017; Craig, Zhang, & Lipp, 2017; Lipp et al, 2015). In the present study, the same faces were manipulated to be evaluated positively or negatively across participants and we demonstrate for the first time that the influence of evaluations on emotion recognition is independent of the unique qualities of the face.…”

You look pretty happy: Attractiveness moderates emotion perception.

“…Invariant facial cues, such as sex and race, have been shown to moderate the happy face advantage. The happy face advantage has been shown to be larger for female faces when categorized together with male faces (Bijlstra, Holland, & Wigboldus, 2010; Craig, Koch, & Lipp, 2017; Craig & Lipp, 2017; Craig, Zhang, & Lipp, 2017; Hugenberg & Sczesny, 2006; Lipp, Craig, & Dat, 2015; Lipp, Karnadewi, Craig, & Cronin, 2015), and is sometimes reversed for the male faces, with angry expressions being recognized faster (Becker, Kenrick, Neuberg, Blackwell, & Smith, 2007). Conversely, the happy face advantage is evident for male own-race faces when categorized together with male other-race faces (Bijlstra et al, 2010; Craig, Koch, et al, 2017; Craig, Mallan, & Lipp, 2012; Lipp, Craig, et al, 2015), and sometimes a reversed pattern has been observed on the male other-race faces, where the negative expression has been categorized faster than happy expressions (Craig et al, 2012; Hugenberg, 2005).…”

Construction of face databases for tasks to recognize facial expressions of basic emotions: a systematic review

“…Cultural issues must be taken into account when understanding these emotional expressions, as they can exert an influence on their recognition 73 . A study that considered ethnicity as an influencing factor in the performance of emotion recognition tasks and compared this ability to identify emotions between Australian and Chinese individuals verified that people perform worse when classifying emotions that are expressed on faces of another ethnicity 74 . In this sense, the cultural characteristics of the stimulus presented can also modulate performance in the test.…”