Building biases in infancy: The influence of race on face and voice emotion matching
Researchers investigate whether infants’ ability to recognize emotions on faces is influenced by race and age
Suggested instructions
This research summary can be incorporated into a lecture or shared with students as a reading to demonstrate how psychological science explores the diversity of human experience. This resource can also be used to encourage students to identify the major components of a research study (i.e., the hypothesis or study question, sample, method, and findings). Students can be asked to identify potential limitations of the study and encouraged to discuss the implications for our understanding of human behavior. Keywords highlight how concepts within and across pillars are incorporated into a single research study.
Research summary
Margaret Vogel and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts hypothesized that infants’ ability to recognize emotions on faces would be influenced by race and age. Forty-eight White infants with little to no previous experience with African American or Black individuals participated in this study. Each infant came to the lab with a parent for a one-hour session during which the infants looked at pictures of faces (own- and other-race; happy or sad) and listened to sounds (laughing or crying) while their looking time and brain activity were recorded. Although 5-month-old infants were equally good at telling apart faces from both races, 9-month-old infants were only able to distinguish faces within their own race. Nine-month-old infants were also less able to accurately match emotional sounds with emotional expressions of different-race individuals. Finally, measures of brain activity revealed that 9-month-olds, but not 5-month-olds, had differential neural processing of own-race compared to other-race emotional faces. This research suggests that throughout the first year of life, babies are developing highly specialized perceptual abilities in response to important people in their environment, such as family members. It also means that biases in face recognition begin well before our ideas of race are formed.
The development of resources to broaden diversity and representation in the teaching of high school psychology resources is an APA Committee of Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools initiative supported by funding from the American Psychological Foundation David and Carol Myers Fund. This resource was developed by Eric Castro, Shawn C.T. Jones, PhD, Allyn Olsen, and Catherine Sanderson, PhD.
