Four studies tested the hypothesis that prejudice, social categorization, and the perception of facial emotion are deeply intertwined. Specifically, I hypothesized that individuals who possess implicit anti-Black attitudes would be relatively more likely to perceive hostile affect on Black faces. Studies 1 and 2 showed that, under conditions of affective ambiguity, implicit prejudice is associated with an increased tendency to see hostility in Black (as compared to White) targets. To test this hypothesis, a facial emotion change detection task was employed in which participants detected the offset or onset of facial anger in both Black and White targets. As predicted, implicit (but not explicit) prejudice was associated with a greater readiness to perceive anger in Black faces. Prejudice was unrelated to perceptions of anger in matched White faces.; Studies 3 and 4 showed that, under conditions of ambiguous ethnicity, implicit prejudice is associated with a tendency to categorize hostile (as compared to happy) ethnically ambiguous faces as African American. Support was found for this hypothesis using both a speeded dichotomous categorization task and a more deliberative rating scale task. Additionally, identical effects emerge regardless of whether prejudice is measured a week before or immediately after the critical perceptual tasks. As predicted, implicit (but not explicit) prejudice was related to increased sensitivity to the targets' facial expressions, regardless of whether prejudice was measured after or before the ethnicity categorizations were made.; Taken together, these findings indicate that perception of emotion in faces is deeply connected with both the implicit attitudes of the perceiver and the social category of the target. It seems that in situations of ambiguity, prejudice can interact with either perceived emotion or target ethnicity to disambiguate otherwise ambiguous social cues.
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