The influence of social category cues on the happy categorisation advantage depends on expression valence

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) assesses relative strengths of four associations involving two pairs of contrasted concepts (e.g., male-female and family-career). In four studies, analyses of data from 11 Web IATs, averaging 12,000 respondents per data set, supported the following conclusions: (a) sorting IAT trials into subsets does not yield conceptually distinct measures; (b) valid IAT measures can be produced using as few as two items to represent each concept; (c) there are conditions for which the administration order of IAT and self-report measures does not alter psychometric properties of either measure; and (d) a known extraneous effect of IAT task block order was sharply reduced by using extra practice trials. Together, these analyses provide additional construct validation for the IAT and suggest practical guidelines to users of the IAT.

Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judgment tasks and indicated bottom-up perceptual processes rather than just top-down conceptually driven ones. Results from additional studies in which neutrally expressive faces were used suggested that the connections between masculine features and angry expressions and between feminine features and happy expressions might be a property of the sexual dimorphism of the face itself and not merely a result of gender stereotypes biasing the perception. ((c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).

The human amygdala robustly activates to fear faces. Heightened response to fear faces is thought to reflect the amygdala's adaptive function as an early warning mechanism. Although culture shapes several facets of emotional and social experience, including how fear is perceived and expressed to others, very little is known about how culture influences neural responses to fear stimuli. Here we show that the bilateral amygdala response to fear faces is modulated by culture. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure amygdala response to fear and nonfear faces in two distinct cultures. Native Japanese in Japan and Caucasians in the United States showed greater amygdala activation to fear expressed by members of their own cultural group. This finding provides novel and surprising evidence of cultural tuning in an automatic neural response.