Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat

Black men tend to be stereotyped as threatening and, as a result, may be disproportionately targeted by police even when unarmed. Here, we found evidence that biased perceptions of young Black men\u27s physical size may play a role in this process. The results of 7 studies showed that people have a bias to perceive young Black men as bigger (taller, heavier, more muscular) and more physically threatening (stronger, more capable of harm) than young White men. Both bottom-up cues of racial prototypicality and top-down information about race supported these misperceptions. Furthermore, this racial bias persisted even among a target sample from whom upper-body strength was controlled (suggesting that racial differences in formidability judgments are a product of bias rather than accuracy). Biased formidability judgments in turn promoted participants\u27 justifications of hypothetical use of force against Black suspects of crime. Thus, perceivers appear to integrate multiple pieces of information to ultimately conclude that young Black men are more physically threatening than young White men, believing that they must therefore be controlled using more aggressive measures

When facial expressions do and do not signal minds: the role of face inversion, expression dynamism, and emotion type

Recent research has linked facial expressions to mind perception. Specifically, Bowling and Banissy (2017) found that ambiguous doll-human morphs were judged as more likely to have a mind when smiling. Herein, we investigate three key potential boundary conditions of this “expression-to-mind” effect. First, we demonstrate that face inversion impairs the ability of happy expressions to signal mindful states in static faces; however, inversion does not disrupt this effect for dynamic displays of emotion. Finally, we demonstrate that not all emotions have equivalent effects. Whereas happy faces generate more mind ascription compared to neutral faces, we find that expressions of disgust actually generate less mind ascription than those of happiness

Accessing Justice with Zoom: Experiences and Outcomes in Online Civil Courts

The global COVID-19 pandemic brought significant change to our civil justice system, particularly in the rapid shift from in-person to remote court proceedings. Courts across the country, facing the unprecedented challenge of a global health emergency, embraced rapid innovation and the adoption of remote proceeding platforms, such as Zoom and Webex. State courts did so across case types, including within high-volume civil dockets containing evictions, debt collections, small claims, and family law cases, where millions of self-represented and unrepresented litigants encounter the U.S. civil justice system each year. Amid the pandemic, voices converged to encourage these justice innovations, including the voices of Supreme Court justices, state court administrators, and access to justice reformers who reimagined judicial administration with these new technologies. Concurrently, given this rapid national experiment, challenges ensued, complicated by inexperience with these platforms prior to the pandemic and vexing digital divides. This report enters the national conversation at an especially crucial time: state supreme courts and court administrators are actively deliberating on what the new normal will entail post-pandemic

Configural Processing and Social Judgments: Face Inversion Particularly Disrupts Inferences of Human-Relevant Traits

Perceivers tend to strongly agree about the basic trait information that they encode from faces. Although some research has found significant consistency for social inferences from faces viewed at multiple angles, disrupting configural processing can substantially alter the traits attributed to faces. Here, we reconciled these findings by examining how disruptions to configural processing (via face inversion) selectively impairs trait inferences from faces. Across four studies (including a pre-registered replication), we found that inverting faces disrupted inferences about particularly human-relevant traits (trustworthiness and humanness) more than it did for a trait relevant to both human and non-human animals (dominance). These findings contribute to emerging research linking configural processing to the humanization of social targets, helping to provide a clearer understanding of how visual cognition may moderate perceptions of humanness

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on First-Generation Women Test-Takers: Magnifying Adversities, Stress, and Consequences for Bar Exam Performance.

By magnifying gender- and socioeconomic status-based inequalities, the COVID-19 pandemic caused stress and disrupted career progress for professional students. The present work investigated the impact of pandemic-related stress and prevailing barriers on structurally disadvantaged women preparing for a high-stakes professional exam. In Study 1, we found that among US law students preparing for the October 2020 California Bar Exam—the professional exam that enables one to become a practicing attorney in California—first-generation women reported the greatest stress from pandemic-related burdens and underperformed on the exam relative to others overall, and particularly compared to continuing-generation women. This underperformance was explained by pandemic-related stress they contended with most, as well as by structural demands shouldered most by first-generation test-takers regardless of gender. Even when controlling for the structural features of caregiving and working while studying, the psychological burdens experienced most by first-generation women predicted lower exam success. Study 2 investigated the February 2021 California Bar Exam. Consistent with Study 1, first-generation women test-takers reported the most pandemic-related stress, which predicted lower exam performance above and beyond structural barriers to exam success. We offer policy prescriptions to bolster the success of at-risk groups in the legal profession pipeline, a challenge magnified by the pandemic

Familiar eyes are smiling: On the role of familiarity in the perception of facial affect

Abstract Quickly and accurately perceiving others' facial affect is paramount for successful social interaction. This work investigates the role of familiarity in helping us to interpret others' facial emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants viewed several faces, some familiar and some novel, and judged how happy each face appeared. As predicted, results showed that familiar faces were perceived as happier than were novel faces. In Experiment 3, participants again viewed several faces, some familiar and some not, and rated the perceived anger or happiness of these faces. As expected, familiar faces were perceived as happier and less angry than were novel faces. Thus, these results suggest that familiarity is one cue we use to interpret the facial affect of others

Denver Pain Authenticity Stimulus Set (D-PASS)

To access this database download the usage agreement via the Download button on this page and send your signed agreement to [email protected]. You will then receive a password permitting access to the database, which may be downloaded in the Additional Files section at the bottom of this page. If you are having trouble accessing these files and encountering an error message it may be due to your current windows subscription. To bypass this issue please follow the instructions below: Download or purchase WinRar by clicking here Download D-PASS.zip from the bottom of this page Double-click D-PASS.zip in your files, then select WinRar and select Extract to D-PASS/ It will ask for the password. Enter the password and click on Ok The files will then be extracted We introduce the Denver Pain Authenticity Stimulus Set (D-PASS), a free resource containing 315 videos of 105 unique individuals expressing authentic and posed pain. All expressers were recorded displaying one authentic (105; pain was elicited via a pressure algometer) and two posed (210) expressions of pain (one posed expression recorded before [posed-unrehearsed] and one recorded after [posed-rehearsed] the authentic pain expression). In addition to authentic and posed pain videos, the database includes an accompanying codebook including metrics assessed at the expresser and video-level (e.g., Facial Action Coding System (FACS) metrics for each video (controlling for neutral images of the expresser), expressers’ pain threshold and pain tolerance values, averaged pain detection performance by naïve perceivers who viewed the videos (e.g., accuracy, response bias), neutral images of each expresser, and face characteristic rating data for neutral images of each expresser (e.g., attractiveness, trustworthiness). The stimuli and accompanying codebook can be accessed for academic research purposes from https://digitalcommons.du.edu/lsdl_dpass/1/. The relatively large number of stimuli allow for consideration of expresser-level variability in analyses and enables more advanced statistical approaches (e.g., signal detection analyses); the inclusion of a large number of Black (n = 41) and White (n = 56) expressers permits investigations into the role of race in pain expression, perception, and authenticity detection; the accompanying codebook may provide pilot data for novel investigations in the intergroup or pain sciences

Impact of perceived interpersonal similarity on attention to the eyes of same‑race and other‑race faces

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2013-0992) and Canada Foundation for Innovation (9297) Grants to Kerry Kawakami.One reason for the persistence of racial discrimination may be anticipated dissimilarity with racial outgroup members that prevent meaningful interactions. In the present research, we investigated whether perceived similarity would impact the processing of same-race and other-race faces.Specifically, in two experiments, we varied the extent to which White participants were ostensibly similar to targets via bogus feedback on a personality test. With an eye tracker, we measured the effect of this manipulation on attention to the eyes, a critical region for person perception and face memory. In Experiment 1, we monitored the impact of perceived interpersonal similarity on White participants’ attention to the eyes of same-race White targets. In Experiment 2, we replicated this procedure, but White participants were presented with either same-race White targets or other-race Black targets in a between-subjects design. The pattern of results in both experiments indicated a positive linear effect of similarity—greater perceived similarity between participants and targets predicted more attention to the eyes of White and Black faces. The implications of these findings related to top-down effects of perceived similarity for our understanding of basic processes in face perception, as well as intergroup relations, are discussed.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) 435-2013-0992Canada Foundation for Innovation CGIAR 929

ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION An Eye for the I: Preferential Attention to the Eyes of Ingroup Members

Human faces, and more specifically the eyes, play a crucial role in social and nonverbal communication because they signal valuable information about others. It is therefore surprising that few studies have investigated the impact of intergroup contexts and motivations on attention to the eyes of ingroup and outgroup members. Four experiments investigated differences in eye gaze to racial and novel ingroups using eye tracker technology. Whereas Studies 1 and 3 demonstrated that White participants attended more to the eyes of White compared to Black targets, Study 2 showed a similar pattern of attention to the eyes of novel ingroup and outgroup faces. Studies 3 and 4 also provided new evidence that eye gaze is flexible and can be meaningfully influenced by current motivations. Specifically, instructions to individuate specific social categories increased attention to the eyes of target group members. Furthermore, the latter experiments demonstrated that preferential attention to the eyes of ingroup members predicted important intergroup biases such as recognition of ingroup over outgroup faces (i.e., the own-race bias; Study 3) and willingness to interact with outgroup members (Study 4). The implication of these findings for general theorizing on face perception, individuation processes, and intergroup relations are discussed