Psychophysics Reveals Nonconscious Effects of Inferred Racial Faces on Emotion Discrimination

Self-identified white observers showed increased sensitivity for angry (vs. happy) faces even at subliminal levels with the greatest sensitivity for brown faces.  IAT-classified strong-white-preference observers showed little differences with pink faces indicating less ambiguity with same-race emotion discriminability.  Our results reveal subthreshold processing involvement with racial biases of affect perception.