Facial expressions of anger improve neural correlates of memory retrieval but not encoding of only same-race faces

The other-race effect is the phenomenon that people are better able to recognize and remember faces of their same race. Angry faces have been shown to facilitate processes that promote face recognition as reflected in the proportion of remembered faces after study. The other-race effect may be diminished when other-race faces display negative expressions, but no event-related potential studies have examined whether this improvement in other-race face recognition occurs during facial encoding or recognition. The current study used the old-new recognition task to examine whether anger reduces the other-race effect by improving face memory for other race faces in comparison to neutral faces and whether this improvement would be reflected during encoding or retrieval. Caucasian and African American faces were rated as angry or neutral by a separate pool of Caucasian participants. Caucasian and African/African American participants in the old-new task studied the faces rated as most angry or neutral and later identified them among distractors in the test phase. The Dm, FN400, and parietal old-new effect were recorded during the study and test phase for Caucasian participants. Anger did not improve other-race face memory in behavior for either race of participants. For Caucasian participants, activation increased during retrieval of previously studied angry Caucasian faces, which indicates more detailed memory retrieval of same-race as compared to other-race angry faces. This is evidence that experience with same-race faces and not stereotypes of other-race faces influences the other-race effect during memory retrieval.