Implicit Racial Attitudes Influence Perceived Emotional Intensity on Other-Race Faces

An ability to accurately perceive and evaluate out-group members' emotions plays a critical role in intergroup interactions. Here we showed that Chinese participants' implicit attitudes toward White people bias their perception and judgment of emotional intensity of White people's facial expressions such as anger, fear and sadness. We found that Chinese participants held pro-Chinese/anti-White implicit biases that were assessed in an evaluative implicit association test (IAT). Moreover, their implicit biases positively predicted the perceived intensity of White people's angry, fearful and sad facial expressions but not for happy expressions. This study demonstrates that implicit racial attitudes can influence perception and judgment of a range of emotional expressions. Implications for intergroup interactions were discussed.