Abstract
The present study used eyetracking methodology to assess whether individuals high in external motivation (EM) to appear nonprejudiced exhibit an early bias in visual attention toward Black faces indicative of social threat perception. Drawing on previous work examining visual attention to socially threatening stimuli, the authors predicted that high-EM participants, but not lower-EM participants, would initially look toward Black faces and then subsequently direct their attention away from these faces. Participants viewed pairs of images, some of which consisted of one White and one Black male face, while a desk-mounted eyetracking camera recorded their eye movements. Results showed that, as predicted, high-EM, but not lower-EM, individuals exhibited patterns of visual attention indicative of social threat perception.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 722-729 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Social Psychological and Personality Science |
Volume | 3 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 2012 |
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship to JAR and a National Science Foundation Fellowship awarded to WSH (#IIS-0705901).
Keywords
- individual differences
- intergroup processes
- intergroup relations
- person perception
- social cognition
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Clinical Psychology