Race, emotion and trust: An ERP study

Faces contain certain cues that can be used to infer the intentions of other people and to formulate beliefs about them. The present study explored the extent to which the race of the partners and their emotional facial expressions influenced participants' decision-making in a Trust Game where race and emotional expression had no actual predictive value regarding the partners’ reciprocation rate. Behaviourally, participants shared more money with happy than with angry partners. In two separate experiments, electrophysiological results showed an early interaction between race and emotion in the N170 potential and also in the subsequent P200, which suggests inter-dependent processing of those cues in a social context. Overall, our results indicate that racial and emotional cues exert both independent and also interacting effects in the processing of faces in an interpersonal context.

► We explored how the brain processes race and social emotional expression using EEG.
► Partner’s non-predictive emotions biased participants’ cooperation rates.
► The N170 showed interactive effects of emotion and race in a social context.