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So my advisor (reg) was in the music scene when he was an undergrad, which was the early to mid 90s, and he played trumpet, which is strange because I could never consider trumpet one of those instruments. And so we discussed this a few weeks ago, instead of discussing what has become "the race stuff" (how the interplay of the facial cues that are
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There's a stereotype that people are quicker to associate anger to black males and fear for white males, when they are in a biracial set. In a monoracial set, the black males would still have a higher mean if rated on how angry they look. This is a stereotype that black males are angry (they're threatening) and stereotypes are what is known as top-down effects, which is the way we describe the cognitive processes that alter our perception.
The thing is that the features of black faces are more babyish (big lips, wider set eyes, etc). And a lot of research shows that rounder and babyish features are associated with faces that look more fearful (and joyful and sad too). So there's two different things that are going on, basically black faces, if they weren't associated with black stereotypes, would look more fearful.
So what we do is blur the faces (a 6 pixel gaussian blur) after we standardize the contrast so it's harder to see them, you can still tell race but it's not that obvious. And what we find is that the black males are rated as less angry as white males, more fearful, more joyful and sadder (which is the same way that people normally rate males versus females, because female faces are rounder). Hope that clears a few things up.
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