Scholarly Commons

Does in-group bias influence the processing of emotional expressions?

Identification of emotional expressions plays an important role in human interaction. Tanaka et al. (2012) found that people rely primarily on the lower half of the face to identify happy expressions and the upper half to identify angry expressions. Individuals use both holistic and analytic processing when determining facial emotions; therefore, researchers argue that holistic and analytic processing should be viewed on a continuum. However, social factors may also influence face processing. Hugenberg and Corneille (2009) found that social categorization leads to improved memory for faces belonging to an individual’s in-group. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether in-group bias created by social categorization affects the speed, accuracy, and eye gaze fixation patterns of the processing of emotions.