An Eye Movement Research Of The Influence Of Emotions On Own-Race Bias

The own-race bias is not only an important research topic in the field of face recognition, but also the crucial study object in social psychology and cross-cultural psychology. Currently there hasn't been any systematic study of own-race bias in China. Although a lot of psychologists have raised a variety of theoretical hypothesis from different angles so far, a hundred schools of thought contend and has been debated for nearly 40 years, the internal mechanisms of face recognition hasn't come to a satisfactory and convincing agreement. The conclusions of this study not only have great theoretical significance, but also have important practical value, which can help to improve the identification accuracy of different racial eyewitness in the field of administration of justice. According to the results of this study, we can also design a reasonable plan to give effective interventions in working and learning place existing ORB, with a view to foster social harmony and racial harmony.This study was carried out to investigate whether positive emotions can eliminate the own-race bias in face recognition on the basis of previous studies, and seek to use advanced eye tracker technology to explore the underlying mechanisms of the elimination of ORB and the different eye movement sampling strategy of Chinese when processing own race faces and other race faces.This study had three experiments. Experiment 1 examined the validity of emotion induction and checked the time course. Experiment 2 examined the effect of different emotions on cross-racial face encoding by using a standard recognition paradigm. The two groups of participants were assigned to induce positive and negative emotions respectively before encoding, and all participants were induced neutral emotion before retrieval. In order to explore the effect of different emotions on cross-racial face retrieval, experiment 3 including three small experiments used the same paradigm as experiment 2. In each small experiment, the two groups of participants kept same emotion in encoding stage, and were induced different emotions before retrieval. Both experiment 2 and experiment 3 used eye tracker to record the gaze fixation percentage of marginal interest areas, the saccade numbers and the average saccade amplitude.The results were as follows:1. It is effective to induce emotions by video, and the effective time is more than 3 minutes.2. Positive emotions affected the encoding stage of cross-racial face recognition and is conducive to promoting the cognitive processing of cross-race face recognition. The ORB of positive-neutral group is significantly lower than that of the negative-neutral group; The white face recognition accuracy and hit rate of positive-neutral group is significantly higher than that of the negative-neutral group; The white face gaze fixation percentage of marginal interest areas, saccade numbers and average saccade amplitude of positive-neutral group is significantly more than those of negative-neutral group.3. Positive emotions had an important influence on the retrieval stage of cross-racial face recognition.(1) The ORB of neutral-positive group is significantly lower than that of the neutral-negative group; The white face recognition accuracy and hit rate of neutral-positive group is significantly higher than that of the neutral-negative group; The white face gaze fixation percentage of marginal interest areas, saccade numbers and average saccade amplitude of neutral-positive group is significantly more than those of the neutral-negative group.(2) The ORB of positive-neutral group is significantly lower than that of the positive-negative group; The white face recognition accuracy and hit rate of positive-neutral group is significantly higher than that of the positive-negative group; The white face gaze fixation percentage of marginal interest areas, saccade numbers and average saccade amplitude of postive-neutral group is significantly more than those of the positive-negative group.(3) The ORB had no significant difference between negative-neutral group and negative-positive; The white face gaze fixation percentage of marginal interest areas, saccade numbers and average saccade amplitude of these two groups had also no significant differences.(4) Encoding of face recognition had a major impact on retrieval, good face processing could improve the performance of recognition.