Involuntary evaluation of others' emotional expressions depends on the expresser's group membership. Further evidence for the social message account from the extrinsic affective Simon task
The social message account (SMA) hypothesizes that the
evaluation of emotional facial expressions depends on
the ethnicity of the expressers. For example, according to
SMA, a happy face of a member of a prejudiced ethnicity is
immediately interpreted as potentially malevolent. Evidence
for this approach was found initially in evaluative priming
(EP) and approach-avoidance tasks (AA) by showing an
emotion × ethnicity interaction on positivity scores (EP)
and approach scores (AA), respectively. Recently, attempts to
replicate the EP results failed. Due to the inconclusive EP
results, it was important to examine the influence of ethnicity on processing of emotional expression with another
task testing involuntary evaluations. The extrinsic affective
Simon task was used with stimuli varying on emotion (happy
vs. fear) and ethnicity (White-Caucasian vs. Middle-Eastern
men). This task was chosen because in contrast to EP
(where faces are presented as task-irrelevant primes) faces
are task-relevant. Experiment 1 yielded an emotion × ethnicity interaction with regard to positivity scores that fit SMA
predictions. The results are also important in challenging a
recent theoretical alternative to SMA, namely the processing
conflict account. A generalization of the emotion × ethnicity pattern to learned arbitrary in- and out-groups (Experiment 2) failed, suggesting that involuntary processing of
(task-irrelevant) group status depends on perceptual features