What You See May Depend on Race

Newswise — Research by a Miami University psychologist shows that race matters when it comes to interpreting facial expressions, a finding that has implications for everyday interactions between whites and blacks. Even well-meaning whites see greater hostility in black faces when looking at identical computer-generated facial expressions imposed on faces of both races, says Kurt Hugenberg, assistant professor of psychology at Miami. Such visual cues are important to effective day-to-day communication, and from a broader perspective, the misperceptions may help explain how racial stereotypes are perpetuated as well as how inter-racial interactions can go awry.

Even individuals who claim to evaluate individuals of different races equally are still susceptible to bias in their perceptions.

Research by Hugenberg and Galen Bodenhausen, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, suggests that an unintentional and potentially subconscious bias—what researchers call implicit bias--distorts perception of facial cues.

The two psychologists have conducted a series of experiments that investigate how race and prejudice interact to affect perceptions of the human face.

Their findings, published in the journal Psychological Science (November 2003 and May 2004) indicate that whites show greater readiness to see anger in black faces than in white faces. The tendency was particularly pronounced in subjects who were high in implicit bias.

For example, in one study computer-generated expressions on white and black faces were shown as shifting from anger to happiness. Whites who had stronger implicit biases saw anger linger longer on the black faces than on the white faces, regardless of what participants claimed their level of prejudice was.

In another study, the researchers asked subjects to categorize racially ambiguous faces—some obviously happy, others obviously angry—as African American or European American. They discovered that European Americans were more likely to categorize the angry faces as African American, an effect that again was increased by implicit bias.

Visuals to illustrate this story are at http://newsinfo.muohio.edu/image_display.cfm?mu_im_id=30070063