Gates, A; (2009) Face recognition: Establishing the effect of positive emotion on eliminating the cross-race deficit. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The own-race bias (ORB) is a well-established phenomenon in which individuals are able to recognise and distinguish between faces of their own race better than faces of other races (Meissner & Brigham, 2001 Slone et al., 2000). The cognitive and social factors responsible for the ORB remain unclear (Slone et al., 2000) and a definitive explanation for this phenomenon remains to be elucidated (Teitelbaum & Geiselman, 1997). The aim of this study is to build on the findings published by Johnson and Fredrickson (2005) and to test the hypothesis that positive emotions, relative to negative emotions, reduce the ORB in face recognition. Brief video segments will be used to induce positive or negative emotions in participants, followed by a face recognition task to establish the influence of emotion on the ability to recognise own-race and cross-race faces. The results displayed here are in direct contrast to those observed by Johnson and Fredrickson (2005). Our results showed a substantial, though non-significant, difference between performance in the Caucasian CFMT for the comedy and horror conditions. However, no significant difference between performance in the Chinese CFMT for the comedy and horror conditions was observed. The discussion centres around the findings of the experiments conducted in this study providing a clear rejection of the hypothesis that positive emotions can reduce the ORB.

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