Typical and Reverse Other-Race Effect on Tibetan Students’ Emotional Face Recognition

摘要

We examined whether an other-race effect (ORE) exists in recognizing own groups and other ethnic groups emotional faces and whether such an effect depended on one's individual experience level. We used the learning-recognition paradigm and recruited 80 Tibetan students for each experiment to recognize the emotional faces of Tibetan and Han nationalities. Different types of ORE were observed when individuals recognize different emotional faces. On the one hand, positive emotional faces resulted in typical ORE, which was not influenced by an individual experience level. On the other hand, negative emotional faces resulted in typical ORE for low-experience individuals but resulted in a reverse ORE for high-experience individuals. Therefore, the recognized and identified emotional faces may differ in terms of how they are processed. In addition, the recognition of patterns from these images may be influenced by one's individual experience level.