An ingroup disadvantage in recognizing micro-expressions

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Qi Wu¹  Kunling Peng¹  Yanni Xie¹  Yeying Lai¹  Xuanchen Liu¹  Ziwei Zhao¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology, School of Educational Science, Hunan Normal University;Cognition and Human Behavior Key Laboratory of Hunan Province, Hunan Normal University

关键词: Micro-expression;    Macro-expression;    recognition;    Emotion Perception;    Intergroup bias;    Ingroup advantage;    ingroup disadvantage;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1050068

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Micro-expression is a fleeting facial expression of emotion that usually occurs in high-stake situations and reveals the true emotion that a person tries to conceal. Due to its unique nature, recognizing micro-expression has great applications for fields like law enforcement, medical treatment, and national security. However, the psychological mechanism of micro-expression recognition is still poorly understood. In the present research, we sought to expand upon previous research to investigate whether the group membership of the expresser influences the recognition process of micro-expressions. By conducting two behavioral studies, we found that contrary to the widespread ingroup advantage found in macro-expression recognition, there was a robust ingroup disadvantage in micro-expression recognition instead. Specifically, in Study 1A & 1B, we found that participants were more accurate at recognizing the intense and subtle micro-expressions of their racial outgroups than those micro-expressions of their racial ingroups, and neither the training experience nor the duration of micro-expressions moderated this ingroup disadvantage. In Study 2A & 2B, we further found that mere social categorization alone was sufficient to elicit the ingroup disadvantage for the recognition of intense and subtle micro-expressions, and such an effect was also unaffected by the duration of micro-expressions. These results suggest that individuals spontaneously employ the social category information of others to recognize micro-expressions, and the ingroup disadvantage in micro-expression stems partly from motivated differential processing of ingroup micro-expressions.

【 授权许可】

CC BY