Sarah Gaither

For decades, affective scientists have examined how adults and children reason about others' emotions. Yet, our knowledge is limited regarding how emotion reasoning is impacted by race-that is, how individuals reason about emotions displayed by people of other racial groups. In this review, we examine the developmental origins of racial biases in emotion reasoning, focusing on how White Americans reason about emotions displayed by Black faces/people. We highlight how racial biases in emotion reasoning, which emerge as early as infancy, likely contribute to miscommunications, inaccurate social perceptions, and negative interracial interactions across the lifespan. We conclude by discussing promising interventions to reduce these biases as well as future research directions, highlighting how affective scientists can decenter Whiteness in their research designs. Together, this review highlights how emotion reasoning is a potentially affective component of racial bias among White Americans.

Categorizing racially ambiguous individuals is multifaceted, and the current work proposes social-motivational factors also exert considerable influence on how racial ambiguity is perceived, directing the resolution of ambiguity in a manner that is functionally beneficial to the perceiver. Four studies tested two motivations related to social belonging: belonging needs and racial identification. Greater need to belong and racial identification (Study 1), and two types of social belonging threats—social exclusion (Studies 2a and 2b) and racial identity threat (Study 3)—predicted more catego-rizations of racially ambiguous Black/White faces as Black, with White participants more likely to categorize ambiguous faces as outgroup members (i.e., Black; Studies 1, 2a, 2b, and 3) and Black participants more likely to categorize ambiguous faces as ingroup members (Study 2b). Results also demonstrated that self-affirmation mitigated this motivated categorization for Whites (Study 3), illustrating the malleability of social categorization and its dependency on serving self-relevant goals.

Stereotypes often guide interracial interactions—both the stereotypes we hold about
others, and the stereotypes we believe others hold about us (i.e., meta-stereotypes). In Black-White interactions, the stereotype that Whites are prejudiced is one of the most salient, but does this stereotype vary by gender? White women tend to express more positive racial attitudes than White men, and stereotypes of Whites overlap more with stereotypes about men than with stereotypes about women. Thus, we hypothesized that both prejudice-related meta-stereotypes and stereotypes differ by gender. In Study 1, Whites reported that White men are seen as more prejudiced than White women. Studies 2a and 2b measured Blacks’ perspectives, finding that Blacks also reported that White men are seen as more prejudiced than White women. Together, these findings highlight the importance of considering gender to develop a more nuanced understanding of race-related stereotypes, meta-stereotypes, and interracial interactions.

Racial bias against Black Americans is a continuing problem in the United States. Although interracial dialogue is generally accepted as an effective method to combat racial bias, such dialogues are often avoided because they can make White Americans anxious and are accompanied by negative outcomes. Therefore, in the present study, we tested a simple intervention designed to: 1) increase Whites’ willingness to choose to enter a situation in which they would interact with a Black partner; and 2) reduce the negative outcomes typically found in these interactions. One hundred fifty-seven White participants were randomly assigned to have a conversation with an interaction partner on one of two topics, racial discrimination or sexual identity discrimination. They were further assigned to one of two groups: an intervention group or a control group. The intervention group was told that people tend to avoid interracial interactions because these interactions are anxiety-provoking but that choosing instead to approach interracial interactions may help to reduce future feelings of anxiety. The control group received no such guidance. Results demonstrated that, compared to the control group, participants in the intervention group were more likely to choose to interact with a Black partner over a White partner, and showed more positive nonverbal engagement during the interracial interaction. We discuss the implications of this work for the development of strategies to increase Whites’ engagement in interracial dialogue.

Research shows that I-sharing, or sharing subjective experiences with an outgroup member, positively shapes attitudes toward that outgroup member. We investigated whether this type of social experience would also promote a positive interracial interaction with a novel outgroup member. Results showed that White and Black participants who I-shared with a racial outgroup member (versus I-sharing with a racial ingroup member) expressed more liking toward that outgroup member. However, I-sharing with an outgroup member did not reduce anxious behavior in a future social interaction with a novel racial outgroup member. Therefore, although sharing subjective experiences may increase liking toward one individual from a racial outgroup, it remains to be seen whether this positive experience can influence behaviors in future interactions with other racial outgroup members. Future directions are discussed.

Categorizing racially ambiguous individuals is multifaceted, and the current work proposes social-motivational factors also exert considerable influence on how racial ambiguity is perceived, directing the resolution of ambiguity in a manner that is functionally beneficial to the perceiver. Four studies tested two motivations related to social belonging: belonging needs and racial identification. Greater need to belong and racial identification (Study 1), and two types of social belonging threats—social exclusion (Studies 2a and 2b) and racial identity threat (Study 3)—predicted more categorizations of racially ambiguous Black/White faces as Black, with White participants more likely to categorize ambiguous faces as outgroup members (i.e., Black; Studies 1, 2a, 2b, and 3) and Black participants more likely to categorize ambiguous faces as ingroup members (Study 2b). Results also demonstrated that self-affirmation mitigated this motivated categorization for Whites (Study 3), illustrating the malleability of social categorization and its dependency on serving self-relevant goals.

Research has shown that priming one’s racial identity can alter a biracial individuals’ social behavior, but can such priming also influence their speech? Language is often used as a marker of one’s social group membership and studies have shown that social context can affect the style of language that a person chooses to use, but this work has yet to be extended to the biracial population. Audio clips were extracted from a previous study involving biracial Black/White participants who had either their Black or White racial identity primed. Condition-blind coders rated Black-primed biracial participants as sounding significantly more Black and White-primed biracial participants as sounding significantly more White, both when listening to whole (Study 1a) and thin-sliced (Study 1b) clips. Further linguistic analyses (Studies 2a-2c) were inconclusive regarding the features that differed between the two groups. Future directions regarding the need to investigate the intersections between social identity priming and language behavior with a biracial lens are discussed.

The present study used archival data to examine how White, Black, and biracial Black/White people respond to implicit attitude feedback suggesting that they harbor racial bias that does not align with their self-reported attitudes. The results suggested that people are generally defensive in response to feedback indicating that their implicit attitudes differ from their explicit attitudes. Among monoracial White and Black individuals, this effect was particularly strong when they learned that they were implicitly more pro-White than they indicated explicitly. By contrast, biracial Black/White individuals were defensive about large discrepancies in either direction (e.g., more pro-Black or more pro-White implicit attitudes). These results pinpoint one distinct difference between monoracial and biracial populations, and pave the way for future research to further explore how monoracial majority, minority, and biracial populations compare in other types of attitudes and responses to personal feedback.

Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial ingroup but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N=246, 3-8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object after watching adults (White, Black, and Asian) demonstrate its uses. In the social preferences task, participants saw pairs of children (White, Black, and Asian) and chose with whom they most wanted to socially affiliate. Biracial children showed flexibility in racial identification during learning and social tasks. However, minority-primed biracial children were not more likely than monoracial minorities to socially affiliate with primed racial ingroup members, indicating their ingroup preferences are contextually based.

Past research shows that adults often display poor memory for racially-ambiguous and racial outgroup faces, with both face types remembered worse than own-race faces. The present study examined whether children also show this pattern of results. It also examined whether emerging essentialist thinking about race predicts their memory for faces. Seventy-four White children (ages 4-9) completed a face-memory task comprised of White, Black, and racially-ambiguous Black/White faces. Essentialist thinking about race was also assessed (i.e., thinking of race as immutable and biologically based). White children who used essentialist thinking showed the same bias as White adults—they remembered White faces significantly better than ambiguous and Black faces. However, children who did not use essentialist thinking remembered both White and racially-ambiguous faces significantly better than Black faces. This finding suggests a specific shift in racial thinking wherein the boundaries between racial groups become more discrete, highlighting the importance of how race is conceptualized in judgments of racially-ambiguous individuals.

We know early experience plays a crucial role in the development of face processing, but we know little about how infants learn to distinguish faces from different races, especially for non-Caucasian populations. Moreover, it is unknown whether differential processing of different race faces observed in typically-studied monoracial infants extends to biracial infants as well. Thus, we investigated 3-month-old Caucasian, Asian and biracial (Caucasian-Asian) infants’ ability to distinguish Caucasian and Asian faces. Infants completed two within-subject, infant-controlled habituation sequences and test trials as an eye tracker recorded looking times and scanning patterns. Examination of individual differences revealed significant positive correlations between own-race novelty preference and scanning frequency between eye and mouth regions of own-race habituation stimuli for Caucasian and Asian infants, suggesting that facility in own-race face discrimination stems from active inspection of internal facial features in these groups. Biracial infants, however, showed the opposite effect:  An “own-race” novelty preference was associated with reduced scanning between eye and mouth regions of “own-race” habituation stimuli, suggesting that biracial infants use a distinct approach to processing frequently encountered faces. Future directions for investigating face processing development in biracial populations are discussed.