The Impact of Changing Emotional Expressions on the Own-Race Bias

People tend to better recognize racial ingroup compared to outgroup faces, a widely demonstrated effect known as the Own-Race Bias (ORB). Past research demonstrating this effect has typically presented the same facial stimuli during encoding and recognition. Across three experiments, I investigated whether changing emotional expressions (angry versus neutral) impacted White perceivers’ recognition of White and Black faces. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that participants demonstrated a strong ORB when neutral or angry expressions were presented during both encoding and recognition. Results from Experiment 2 demonstrated that when neutral expressions changed to angry expressions, although overall recognition accuracy decreased, participants still showed a strong ORB. Results from Experiment 3 indicated that when angry expressions changed to neutral expressions, participants showed a larger decrease in recognition accuracy for White compared Black targets, ultimately reducing the ORB. The implications of these findings for facial recognition in an intergroup context are discussed.