Intergroup processes and the happy face advantage: How social categories influence emotion categorization

There is abundant evidence that emotion categorization is influenced by the social category membership of target faces, with target sex and target race modulating the ease with which perceivers can categorize happy and angry emotional expressions. However, theoretical interpretation of these findings is
constrained by gender and race imbalances in both the participant samples and target faces typically used when demonstrating these effects (e.g., most participants have been White women and most Black targets have been men). Across seven experiments, the current research used gender matched samples (Expt. 1a & 1b), gender and racial identity matched samples (Expt. 2a & 2b), and manipulations of social context (Expt. 3a-3b, & Expt. 4), to establish whether emotion categorization is influenced by interactions between the social category membership of perceivers and target faces. Supporting this idea, we found the presence and size of the happy face advantage was influenced by interactions between perceiver and target social categories, with reliable happy face advantages in reaction times for in-group targets but not necessarily for out-group targets. White targets and female targets were the only categories associated with a reliable happy face advantage that was independent of perceiver category. The interactions between perceiver and target social category were eliminated when targets were blocked by social category (e.g., a block of all
White female targets; Expt. 3a & 3b) and accentuated when targets were associated with additional category information (i.e., in-group/out-group nationality; Expt. 4). These findings support the possibility that contextually sensitive intergroup processes influence emotion categorization.