THE INFLUENCE OF RACE AND EMOTION ON COGNITION AND METACOGNITION OF FACIAL PICTURES

Abstract

"In our daily life, the ability of processing the other people's facial features (such as race, emotion, etc.) are of great significance of us to adapt to social environment and participate in social interaction. In this study, a 2 (race: own-race/ other-race) ×2 (emotion: positive/ negative) within-subjects design was used to investigate how the race and emotion on face affect the processing of cognition and the processing of metacognition. There are five tasks: ease-of-learning (EOL) judgement, remembering, judgement of learning (JOL), recognition and judgement of confidence (JOC). The results revealed that :(1) EOL judgement was only affected by race, which showed that participants made higher EOL judgement for other-race faces than for own-race. (2) The processing fluency was only affected by emotion, which showed that participants spend less time for learning the faces with negative emotion. (3) JOL is not only affected by race, but also moderated by emotion. The results showed that: in the positive emotion condition, JOLs of foreign faces was significantly higher than that of native faces, whereas, in the condition of negative emotion, the difference between the two was not significant. (4) Other-race effect was found in recognition scores, and the other-race effect was moderated by emotion. The results showed that the recognition performance of native face was significantly better than that foreign face in the negative emotion condition. In the condition of positive emotion, the difference between the two was not significant. (5) The trend of confidence judgment was the same as recognition scores. The conclusions were as follows :(1) Emotion has a significant influence on face image cod, while race information has a significant influence on face image cod, and emotional information plays a moderating role; (2) The metacognitive processing of face was influenced by multiple factors such as ethnicity, emotion and cognitive processing information. In conclusion, when processing face image, there is significant separation between cognition and metacognition at different stages, under the influence of ethnicity and emotion. In addition, this study also provides a partial explanation for the difference in accuracy between prospective and retrospective metacognitive monitoring."