How attitudes towards Roma predict their perceived attractiveness and assessment of their emotional expressions

Abstract

Outgroup attitudes can have consequences in interpersonal interactions - if a person is prejudiced towards a certain group, they can be biased in the assessment of the physical attractiveness of its members and in judging their emotional expressions, especially negative ones such as anger. Most of the evidence of these phenomena relate to racial prejudice in English speaking contexts. We, therefore, aimed to examine how attitudes towards Roma people as the most stigmatized ethnic minority in Europe, predicted (a) the evaluation of the attractiveness of the outgroups’ faces; (b) perceived emotional intensity and authenticity and (c) the proportion of correctly recognized outgroups’ emotional expressions. As stimuli, we used photos of 60 people of Roma ethnicity aged 18-35; half expressions: neutral, angry, happy, and sad, making a total of 240 photo stimuli. The photos were taken against a white background, and all identifiers of other group memberships were removed from them. A total of 231 students from Belgrade University, aged 19-32 (M = 21.04, SD = 1.55) assessed the photographs. Each participant was presented with a total of 60 photos (15 persons x 4 expressions). Photos with neutral expressions were evaluated on the dimensions of attractiveness and group prototypicality, while the other photos were evaluated on the dimensions of emotional authenticity and emotional intensity. We also recorded a proportion of correctly recognized emotions in the photos. All the listed variables served as criteria, while we used a Feeling thermometer and Social distance scale as indicators of participants’ attitudes towards Roma. A series of multiple linear regressions revealed that attitude predicted attractiveness evaluation (R2 = .139), with social distance as a significant predictor. On the other hand, feelings and social distance did not predict perceived emotional intensity and authenticity, nor the success in identifying emotional expressions (all ps > .1). The latter could be due to the specific content of stereotypes towards Roma, which, unlike the stereotype towards Blacks, does not include hostility and aggressiveness. The lack of relation with the assessment of intensity/authenticity could be a consequence of the fact the models were instructed to act and their success in that task.