On the use of gender categories and emotion categories in threat‐based person impressions

Abstract

People often form impressions of others in contexts where both relatively static demographic cues (e.g., age, race, gender) and situationally flexible, dynamic cues (e.g., emotion expressions) are available. We examined whether and how attending to gender (male, female) versus emotion expression (neutral, smiling) affects threat-based person impressions. In three experiments, we heightened the salience of either gender categories or emotion categories in a sequential priming task. Category salience consistently moderated the use of both categories in threat impressions. The effect of gender (emotion) categories was stronger when attention was directed to gender (emotion) than when attention was directed to emotion (gender); however, category salience did not eliminate the use of either category. Implications for models of person construal and bias in person impressions are discussed.

Intergroup evaluative bias in facial representations of immigrants and citizens in the United States

“…The prime faces were the immigrant and citizen individual images from the image-generation experiment, as well as a featureless outline of a human head that is commonly used in this task. For ease of presentation, and following other SMT research [ 34 , 61 ], we did not include the featureless prime in the analyses reported below. Indeed, it is typical for the featureless prime to elicit negativity [ 62 , 63 ].…”