Positive Feeling, Negative Meaning: Visualizing the Mental Representations of In-Group and Out-Group Smiles

Abstract

Even though smiles are seen as universal facial expressions, research shows that there exist various kinds of smiles (i.e., affiliative smiles, dominant smiles). Accordingly, we suggest that there also exist various mental representations of smiles. Which representation is employed in cognition may depend on social factors, such as the smiling person’s group membership: Since in-group members are typically seen as more benevolent than out-group members, in-group smiles should be associated with more benevolent social meaning than those conveyed by out-group members. We visualized in-group and out-group smiles with reverse correlation image classification. These visualizations indicated that mental representations of in-group smiles indeed express more benevolent social meaning than those of out-group smiles. The affective meaning of these visualized smiles was not influenced by group membership. Importantly, the effect occurred even though participants were not instructed to attend to the nature of the smile, pointing to an automatic association between group membership and intention.

Minimal group membership biases early neural processing of emotional expressions

“…Altogether, our results are concordant with Ratner et al . ()'s suggestion that mere membership in an arbitrary group can prompt divergent mental representations (and expectations) of in‐group and out‐group facial features (see also Paulus et al ., ), and further highlight how such polarized expectations can impact the very first stages of face processing.…”

Visualising mental representations: A primer on noise-based reverse correlation in social psychology

“…Generally, the ingroup CI was judged more positively than the outgroup CI by independent raters. This work was extended by Paulus, Rohr, Dotsch and Wentura (2016), who visualised the interpretation of an ingroup vs. outgroup smile after assignment to minimal groups (Paulus et al, 2016). The CIs showed that smiles of ingroup members signal more benevolence than those of outgroup members.…”

Facial Features Underlying the Decoding of Pain Expressions

“…15,17]. Take for instance the mental representation of other-group faces: studies have shown that individuals represent the facial appearance of someone more positively when they come from the same social group than when they come from another social group [12,37,53]. In other…”