Involuntary evaluation of others' emotional expressions depends on the expresser's group membership. Further evidence for the social message account from the extrinsic affective Simon task

Abstract

The social message account (SMA) hypothesizes that the evaluation of emotional facial expressions depends on the ethnicity of the expressers. For example, according to SMA, a happy face of a member of a prejudiced ethnicity is immediately interpreted as potentially malevolent. Evidence for this approach was found initially in evaluative priming (EP) and approach-avoidance tasks (AA) by showing an emotion × ethnicity interaction on positivity scores (EP) and approach scores (AA), respectively. Recently, attempts to replicate the EP results failed. Due to the inconclusive EP results, it was important to examine the influence of ethnicity on processing of emotional expression with another task testing involuntary evaluations. The extrinsic affective Simon task was used with stimuli varying on emotion (happy vs. fear) and ethnicity (White-Caucasian vs. Middle-Eastern men). This task was chosen because in contrast to EP (where faces are presented as task-irrelevant primes) faces are task-relevant. Experiment 1 yielded an emotion × ethnicity interaction with regard to positivity scores that fit SMA predictions. The results are also important in challenging a recent theoretical alternative to SMA, namely the processing conflict account. A generalization of the emotion × ethnicity pattern to learned arbitrary in- and out-groups (Experiment 2) failed, suggesting that involuntary processing of (task-irrelevant) group status depends on perceptual features.