Mental Representations and Facial Impressions of Muslim Men in Japan From 2015 to 2017

Abstract

There is prejudice against Muslims in many nations, including Japan. This prejudice would be related to biased mental representations of Muslim faces. Moreover, in 2015, the increased news coverage linking Muslims to terrorism in Japan would have enhanced such negative mental representations. In the present study, Japanese participants were asked to imagine Muslim men, and from two faces with a random noise pattern added, participants were instructed to choose the face they imagined to be more Muslim. Typical Muslim facial representations were visualized in 2015, 2016, and 2017 by averaging all selected noise patterns using reverse correlation. The visualized representations were evaluated using the dimensions of warmth, competence, and basic emotions. The results showed that the warmth scores for the visualized facial representation were lower in 2015 than in 2017, whereas competence scores did not differ between the representations in 2015, 2016, and 2017. “Angry” and “disgusted” scores for the facial representation in 2015 were higher than those in 2017, whereas “happy” scores in 2015 were lower than those in 2017. The decreased “angry” score and increased “happy” score predicted an increase in the impression of warmth from 2015 to 2017.