Neurodynamic evidence reveals identity top-down influences emotional contagion of race

Faces contain important information about emotion, race, identity, and age. A large body of research has illustrated that emotional contagion is influenced by race. The Categorization-Individuation Model (CIM) suggests that situational cues (e.g., authority, subjectively important ingroup-outgroup) cause perceivers to shift their attention to identity-diagnostic facial characteristics, especially for other-race faces. The current study is designed to reveal whether identity can top-down influence emotional contagion across races, and the time course of this influence. We recruited 30 Chinese college students to participate in two experiments. Experiment 1 used dynamic emotional faces of Asians and Whites to assess emotional contagion in different races. Experiment 2, based on experiment 1, employed a minimal group paradigm assigning identity information to the racial faces. We used ERP analysis to predict the potential neural mechanism of the influence of identity on racial emotion contagion, and used representation similarity analysis (RSA) to explore the temporal dynamics of the representation of race, emotion, and identity. Our results showed that (1) in experiment 1, Whites produced stronger P1 amplitudes than Asians; in experiment 2, RSA results showed that the time course of representation of race was about 100 ms. (2) In experiments 1 and 2, Happy produced stronger P200 amplitude than Angry; Asians produced stronger P200 amplitude than Whites; The RSA results showed that the time course of representation of emotion and emotional contagion both began about 200 ms after face appearance. (3) In experiment 2, the P300 amplitudes showed a significant interaction of identity and race, and in different group conditions, the P300 amplitude in Asians was stronger than in Whites; however, in the same group conditions, the difference between the two races was insignificant. Results illustrate that identity information top-down influences the neural mechanisms of racial emotional contagion, and the effects are divided into at least three stages: (1) an early stage bottom-up perceptual categorization of other-race; (2) a middle stage emotional and individualization processing; and (3) a late stage top-down modulation by identity cues. Our study is the first to explain the neurodynamics of emotional contagion processing using the Categorization-Individuation Model.