Intergroup emotion judgments and empathy: the influence of group category membership and group relations
Keywords: emotion perception
prejudice
facial expressions
social learning
intergroup relations
social norms
empathy

Judgments of others’ emotions and empathy in response to these emotions are shaped by the characteristics of the expresser, including which groups they belong to. To date, most research has taken one of the two approaches to examine the influence of group membership on emotion judgments and empathy. First, a lot of past research has exposed participants to members of real-world group categories (e.g., racial, gender, or political groups) and tracked whether these categories influence how participants judge and respond to emotions. This approach has mostly refrained from generalising findings to unexamined intergroup contexts and from providing insights into group processes more broadly. Second, an equal amount of research effort has gone into exposing participants to members of novel group categories associated with arbitrary labels and tracking whether these categories influence how participants judge and respond to emotions. This approach has mostly interpreted findings in terms of “ingroups” and “outgroups”, thus implying that all ingroups and outgroups should be expected to exert similar influence. Both of these approaches make it difficult to identify meaningful contextual variability across intergroup contexts and to systematise how abstract features of particular ingroups and outgroups, their relations, and the environments in which they operate might affect emotion judgments and empathy. For instance, should groups be expected to influence emotion judgments and empathy regardless of the specific relations between them (e.g., whether the relations are cooperative or competitive), or do intra- and intergroup relations meaningfully shape these psychological processes? To offer a more precise answer to the question of when (i.e., in which intergroup contexts) intergroup biases in emotion judgments and empathy are likely to occur, the present thesis examines the influence of group relations alongside group category membership on empathy and judgments of facial expressions. Chapter 1 reviews relevant literature, introduces the analytic lens (feature-oriented thinking about groups), and outlines the seven experiments comprising this thesis. Chapter 2 investigates how group category membership and coalitional relations (i.e., competition, cooperation) influence judgments of facial expressions of emotion and whether there are any attentional and physiological markers associated with the processing of social information in intergroup contexts. Whereas Chapter 2 focuses on judgments of facial expressions, Chapter 3 investigates people’s subjective perceptions of social norms surrounding intergroup empathy (i.e., intergroup empathic norms) and how these perceptions vary as a function of how relevant group relations are perceived. Chapter 4 expands on Chapter 3 to examine the causal influence of intergroup empathic norms on one’s own intergroup empathy. Specifically, Chapter 4 explores the mechanisms through which intergroup empathic norms achieve their influence, the preferences people display when faced with ingroup and outgroup norms that demand misaligned emotional reactions (intergroup apathy versus intergroup empathy), and the ways in which observable emotions can serve as cues of the underlying relations between groups. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses the theoretical and practical implications of this body of work and outlines novel directions for research looking at the interplay between socio-affective and group processes. Overall, this thesis shows that intergroup biases in emotion judgments and empathy depend not only on the general distinction between ingroups and outgroups but also on the specific relations between the ingroups and outgroups under consideration. This thesis also highlights the need for features of groups, group relations, and group environments to be more meaningfully incorporated into social psychological research and theorising.