Social Categorization and the Perception of Facial Affect: Target Race Moderates the Response Latency Advantage for Happy Faces

Two experiments competitively test 3 potential mechanisms (negativity inhibiting responses, feature-based accounts, and evaluative context) for the response latency advantage for recognizing happy expressions by investigating how the race of a target can moderate the strength of the effect. Both experiments indicate that target race modulates the happy face advantage, such that European American participants displayed the happy face advantage for White target faces, but displayed a response latency advantage for angry (Experiments 1 and 2) and sad (Experiment 2) Black target faces. This pattern of findings is consistent with an evaluative context mechanism and inconsistent with negativity inhibition and feature-based accounts of the happy face advantage. Thus, the race of a target face provides an evaluative context in which facial expressions are categorized.