title: Invisible own- and other-race faces presented under continuous flash suppression produce affective response biases.
abstract: One triumph of the human mind is the ability to place the multitudinous array of people we encounter into in- and out-group members based on racial characteristics. One fundamental question that remains to be answered is whether invisible own- and other-race faces can nevertheless influence subsequent affective judgments. Here, we employed continuous flash suppression (CFS) to render own- and other-race faces unperceivable in an affective priming task. Both on-line and off-line awareness checks were employed to provide more stringent control of partial awareness. Results revealed that relative to own-race faces, imperceptible other-race faces significantly facilitated participants' identification of negative words, suggesting an other-race derogation bias. When faces were presented consciously, we found that not only other-race faces facilitated detection of negative words, but also own-race faces facilitated detection of positive words. These findings together provide novel and strong evidence suggesting that invisible racial faces can bias affective responses.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Shanghai, China; Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Xiaoqing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Yuhao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
authors.forename: Galen V
authors.initials: GV
authors.lastname: Bodenhausen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. Electronic address: sfu@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Shimin
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology*; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D063505:Racism / Q000523:psychology*; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Affective priming; Continuous flash suppression; Interocular suppression; Unconsciousness