scholarly journals Face Processing in Infancy and Beyond: The Case of Social Categories

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul C. Quinn ◽  
Kang Lee ◽  
Olivier Pascalis

Prior reviews of infant face processing have emphasized how infants respond to faces in general. This review highlights how infants come to respond differentially to social categories of faces based on differential experience, with a focus on race and gender. We examine six different behaviors: preference, recognition, scanning, category formation, association with emotion, and selective learning. Although some aspects of infant responding to face race and gender may be accounted for by traditional models of perceptual development, other aspects suggest the need for a broader model that links perceptual development with social and emotional development. We also consider how responding to face race and gender in infancy may presage responding to these categories beyond infancy and discuss how social biases favoring own-race and female faces are formed.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Lei ◽  
Rachel Leshin ◽  
Kelsey Moty ◽  
Emily Foster-Hanson ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes

The present studies examined how gender and race information shape children’s prototypes of various social categories. Children (N=543; Mage=5.81, range=2.75 - 10.62; 281 girls, 262 boys; 193 White, 114 Asian, 71 Black, 50 Hispanic, 39 Multiracial, 7 Middle-Eastern, 69 race unreported) most often chose White people as prototypical of boys and men—a pattern that increased with age. For female gender categories, children most often selected a White girl as prototypical of girls, but an Asian woman as prototypical of women. For superordinate social categories (person and kid), children tended to choose members of their own gender as most representative. Overall, the findings reveal how cultural ideologies and identity-based processes interact to shape the development of social prototypes across childhood.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Lei ◽  
Rachel Leshin ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes

Race and gender information overlap to shape adults’ representations of social categories. This overlap can lead to the “psychological invisibility” of people whose race and gender identities are perceived to have conflicting stereotypes. The present research examines whether and when race begins to bias representations of gender across development. Using a speeded categorization task, Study 1 revealed that children were slower to categorize Black women as women, relative to White and Asian women as women and Black men as men. Children were also more likely to mis-categorize Black women as men and less likely to stereotype Black women as feminine. Study 2 replicated these findings and provided evidence of a developmental shift in categorization speed. An omnibus analysis provided a high-powered test of developmental hypotheses, revealing that target race began biasing children’s gender categorization around age 5. Implications for the development of social category representation are discussed.


2019 ◽  
pp. 105-132
Author(s):  
Cailin O'Connor

The chapter starts with an introduction of the primary paradigm used in this half of the book—the bargaining game. It uses this model to show why in groups with social categories fairness in bargaining is not the expected outcome of cultural evolution. Instead, social categories act as a symmetry breaker that stabilizes inequitable bargaining conventions. The chapter then turns to the role power plays in the evolution of bargaining. Powerful groups often gain an advantage with respect to the emergence of conventions of resource division. This can lead to compounding processes that profoundly disadvantage some social groups. These models make especially clear how irrelevant markers like race and gender can come to be more important in determining resource division than relevant factors, such as individual status.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 474
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Rennels ◽  
Andrea J. Kayl ◽  
Kirsty M. Kulhanek

Infants show an advantage in processing female and familiar race faces, but the effect sizes are often small, suggesting individual differences in their discrimination abilities. This research assessed whether differences in 6–10-month-olds’ temperament (surgency and orienting) predicted how they scanned individual faces varying in race and gender during familiarization and whether and how long it took them to locate the face during a visual search task. This study also examined whether infants viewing faces posing pleasant relative to neutral expressions would facilitate their discrimination of male and unfamiliar race faces. Results showed that infants’ surgency on its own or in conjunction with their orienting regularly interacted with facial characteristics to predict their scanning and location of faces. Furthermore, infants’ scanning patterns (dwell times and internal–external fixation shifts) correlated with their ability and time to locate a familiarized face. Moreover, infants who viewed faces with pleasant expressions showed better discrimination of unfamiliar race and male faces compared with infants who viewed neutral faces. Including temperament in the analyses consistently demonstrated its significance for understanding infant face processing. Findings suggest that positive interactions with other-race individuals and men might reduce processing disadvantages for those face types. Locating familiar adults in a timely manner is a crucial skill for infants to develop and these data elucidate factors influencing this ability.


2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-25
Author(s):  
Douglas Porter

The Research Domain Criteria project, although innovative, remains thoroughly grounded in a naturalist conception of psychopathology. Exploring the meaning of psychopathology with reference to social categories such as race and gender makes it apparent that, by taking this naturalist approach, Research Domain Criteria runs the risk of treating contingent social norms as immutable facts of nature. The political impact of this approach is inherently conservative as it perpetuates the status quo, even if the status quo entails discrimination. These political effects are not an inevitable outcome of the application of neuroscience to the study of psychopathology. Exploring the implications of neuroplasticity demonstrates that maintaining rigid dichotomies between the biological and the social is untenable. Accordingly, taking a neuroscience approach to psychopathology actually reveals the significance of social science, phenomenological, and narrative-based approaches to research and ultimately points toward the ethical significance of service user participation in the science of nosology.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Lei ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes

Children develop rich concepts of social categories based on gender, race, and other social dimensions throughout early and middle childhood. However, less is known about the development of representations at the intersection of multiple categories. This is a critical issue because overlooking how children integrate information about multiple category identities causes a major gap in our understanding of the development of social cognition. To address this issue, we suggest researchers adopt an intersectional framework. By intersectional framework, we mean consideration of both how power structures contribute to systems of inequality as well as variability in how group-based bias is expressed towards people with one vs. multiple minoritized identities. Using research on children’s use of race and gender, we describe how our current understanding of social categorization is incomplete, and how an intersectional framework can advance both equity and theory.


2016 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 219-238
Author(s):  
Francesca de Rosa

In this essay I will discuss the iconographic constructions developed by the Portuguese colonial project, arguing that Estado Novo has used cinema to consolidate social categories defined by the regime propaganda, using a discourse based on reality and authenticity and through the projection of stereotyped structures such as race and gender. Moving in the background of the theoretical frame on the concepts of archive and digital archive, the analysis will focus on a deconstructive re-interpretation of colonial and dominant narratives in two documentaries realized for the Portuguese industrial exposition in 1932, África em Lisboa – Os Indígenas da Guiné na Grande Exposição Industrial ((Africa in Lisbon- The Indigenous People of Guinea in The Great Industrial Exhibition) and Guiné Aldeia Indígena em Lisboa – 1932 (Guinea Indigenous Village in Lisbon- 1932). The discussion will hence be centered on the representation and the construction of relations of dominance and power over the black female body.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (8) ◽  
pp. 911-926
Author(s):  
Ryan F. Lei ◽  
Rachel A. Leshin ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes

Race and gender information overlap to shape adults’ representations of social categories. This overlap may contribute to the psychological “invisibility” of people whose race and gender identities are perceived to have conflicting stereotypes. The present research ( N = 249) examined when race begins to bias representations of gender across development. Children and adults engaged in a speeded task in which they categorized photographs of faces of women and men from three racial categories: Asian, Black, and White (four photographs per gender and racial group). In Study 1, participants were slower to categorize photographs of Black women as women than photographs of White and Asian women as women and Black men as men. They also were more likely to miscategorize photographs of Black women as men and less likely to stereotype Black women as feminine. Study 2 replicated these findings and provided evidence of a developmental shift in categorization speed. An omnibus analysis provided a high-powered test of this developmental hypothesis, revealing that target race begins biasing children’s gender categorization around age 5. Implications for the development of social-category representation are discussed.


Author(s):  
Signithia Fordham

The first chapter presents the theoretical framework of this book by foregrounding structural violence, highlighting the nexus between culturally approved hegemonic female- specific power and the reproduction of gender inequality. It looks through the prism of symbolic violence and the way its perceived ordinariness, normality, or blandness is implicated in its misrecognition among school officials and the entire student body. It is especially devoted to chronicling the anthropological theoretical claims shaping the ethnographic data presented in this book, especially as they are related to the society’s major social categories: race, class, and particularly the intersectionality of race and gender. It is here that the author begins to propose a theory of gender-specific competition in which the often hidden and/or misrecognized objective of female competition is to lose—in order to win.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Peretz-Lange

Children often hold “essentialist” intuitions about social categories, viewing them as reflecting people’s intrinsic essences or biological natures. This intuition promotes prejudice development (e.g., race- and gender-based prejudices). However, emerging research reveals that essentialism also mitigates prejudice development (e.g., weight- and sexuality-based prejudices). Why do children’s essentialist views sometimes promote prejudice, and other times mitigate it? I propose that causal discounting may account for these distinct effects: Essentialism may promote prejudice by leading children to discount structural explanations (i.e., to reason that a group is low-status because of its personal deficiencies rather than its structural disadvantages), but it may mitigate prejudice by leading children to discount agentic explanations (i.e., to reason that a group was “born that way” rather than choosing to be that way). Thus, the consequences of essentialism may reflect both the explanations children endorse as well as those they discount. Cognitive, developmental, and social implications are discussed.


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