Erasing race: Positive emotions eliminate recognition differences between own-race and other-race faces

The remark "they all look the same to me" to describe members of another race is an example of the own-race bias (ORB) in face recognition. Decades of research have empirically validated that is it harder to recognize members of a different race than members of one's own race. In eight experiments testing 391 participants, presented across three manuscripts, I have shown that positive emotions can alter how other-race faces are perceived. Inducing a joyful emotional state before or after facial encoding eliminated differences in Caucasian participants' recognition of White and Black, or White and Asian faces. Exploring potential mechanisms, I tested whether positive emotions reduce the ORB by changing perceptual scope or by promoting more inclusive categorizations. Positive emotion inductions predicted less narrowing of perceptual focus. More narrowed perceptual focus predicted better recognition of own-race faces, while broader focus predicted better other-race recognition. Positive emotions induced before racial categorization tasks increased the perceived overlap between racial categories. Sensitivity to racial categories was found to moderate when emotions would predict different levels of the ORB. For participants most sensitive to racial category before learning faces, positive emotions induced before encoding eliminated the ORB, but negative emotions increased level of the ORB. While several relationships emerged between positive emotion, perceptual scope, and racial categorization, no mediational links were found to account for how positive emotions eliminate the ORB. Levels of holistic and featural processing were found to be a highly significant but completely independent predictor of own and other-race recognition. Theoretically, this line of research may reveal new insights into the underlying causes of the ORB, interactions of emotional states and perception, interactions of emotional states and memory, and functions of positive emotions. Future studies may investigate other possible sources of mediation and moderation, ways of reducing implicit racial biases, techniques to reduce physiological threat responses during interracial interactions, and how emotions modulate activation of brain areas linked to face recognition and processing emotional information. Practical applications of this work may include techniques for improving eyewitness testimony, facilitating more harmonious interracial work environments, and reducing prejudice and discrimination.