Not all emotional expressions facilitate recognition of other-race faces in Chinese infants

Previous research has shown that the addition of happy or angry expressions to other-race faces can assist infants in overcoming the perceptual narrowing of face race and reinstating their recognition of other-race faces. In the present study, we examined how different facial expressions (happy, angry, fearful, and neutral) influence the recognition of African faces among Chinese infants aged 8 to 12 months. We employed a visual familiarization task and measured infants' looking time. The results revealed that infants exhibited above-chance discrimination of African faces in the happy and angry conditions, but not in the neutral or fearful conditions. The findings suggest that not all facial expressions have a uniform effect on infants' ability to recognize faces of other races.