Intersection of biases: In-group positivity for racially diverse ambiguous facial expressions

Abstract

Emotional expressions offer important social cues about the expresser’s intentions and risks or rewards in the environment. The current study investigated how individual differences in interpretation of ambiguous facial expressions (valence bias) are impacted by intergroup racial biases. In an online study of 409 racially diverse US participants, we found that across racial groups, participants judged in-group faces more positively than out-group faces regardless of expression (happy, angry, or surprised). Furthermore, valence bias generalized from a set of all-White faces to a set of racially diverse faces (Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White). Within the latter task, valence judgments differed as a function of stimulus model race, with more negative judgments of Asian and Black surprised faces. Thus, both individual valence bias and intergroup racial bias influenced emotion judgments, suggesting that these biases intersect in shaping social perceptions and decision-making.