Stigma and Affective Cognition: A Learning-based Account of Intergroup Differences in Facial Emotion Processing

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Ferguson, Melissa

Abstract

Stigma powerfully shapes the social environments of sexual minority individuals by increasing the frequency of exposure to threatening emotional interactions in everyday life. Yet, little is known about whether and how sexual minority individuals cognitively adapt to their threatening social environments and the implications of these cognitive adaptations for understanding sexual orientation differences in risk for social and emotional problems. This dissertation explores population-level differences in how sexual minority compared with heterosexual individuals process and respond to others’ facial expressions of emotion and investigates differential prior experience and learning as one viable explanation for such population-level variation in affective cognition. Chapter 1 introduces a social cognitive perspective on stigma’s role in contributing to population-level differences in social information processing between sexual minority and heterosexual individuals and the downstream consequences of these processing differences for health and wellbeing. According to this perspective, stigma causes sexual minority individuals to be exposed to different social environments than heterosexual individuals and such cumulative exposure to different environments leads to sexual orientation differences in mental representations and cognitive processing strategies that govern how people reason about others’ emotions. Each of the empirical chapters in this dissertation tests hypotheses derived from this perspective to provide novel insights into the cognitive consequences of experiencing a stigmatized sexual orientation and the causal origins of population-level variation in affective cognition. Chapter 2 investigates sexual orientation differences in sensory thresholds for perceiving faces as expressing each of the following four emotions: anger, fearfulness, happiness, and sadness. Two studies find category-specific effects of sexual orientation on the ability to parse facial expression continua into discrete emotion categories. As compared with heterosexual individuals, sexual minority individuals require less perceptual information to accurately infer anger and fearfulness, but not happiness or sadness, from others’ facial movements, indicating that sexual orientation differences in emotion perception are specific to threat-signaling expressions. Crucially, these effects remain robust even after accounting for between-group differences in the distribution of several key confounding variables that are known to influence emotion perception abilities, including demographic, affective, and personality factors. Chapter 3 examines sexual orientation differences in the tendency to ascribe positive or negative meaning to emotional ambiguity, as indexed by valence judgments of surprised facial expressions, and experimentally tests an explanation for such variation in evaluative inferences. The first two studies demonstrate that sexual minority individuals interpret emotionally ambiguous, but not unambiguous, facial expressions more negatively than heterosexual individuals and that this effect cannot be attributed to between-group differences in demographics, personality traits, mood, or emotion regulation strategies. Using Pavlovian conditioning procedures, the next two studies show that evaluations of emotional ambiguity exhibit both short-term and long-term malleability in response to repeated environmental exposure to co-occurrences between ambiguous faces and valenced outcomes, suggesting that the observed population-level differences in evaluative inferences can potentially be attributed to differential prior experience and learning. Chapter 4 explores whether and how perceiver sexual orientation interacts with objective parameters of face ensembles to impact the tendency to perceive groups of people as being more emotional than they actually are (i.e., the crowd-emotion-amplification effect). After first establishing the psychometric reliability of individual differences in the tendency to amplify group emotion, two studies show that the amplification effect varies as a function of the threat value of the emotion expressed by the group, with amplification being larger for groups expressing high-threat negative emotions (i.e., anger, fearfulness) compared with low-threat negative emotions (i.e., sadness). Results also reveal differential patterns of amplification based on sexual orientation, with sexual minority individuals exhibiting stronger amplification than heterosexual individuals for groups expressing fearfulness and anger, but not happiness or sadness. Exploratory analyses identify between-group differences in sensitivity to social threat and hypervigilance as partial mediators of the category-specific effects of sexual orientation on amplification. Using Pavlovian conditioning procedures, the final two studies rule out low-level visual confounds as an alternative explanation for the differential impact of different facial expressions of the same valence on ensemble estimates and show that summary statistical representations of group emotion are malleable and subject to environmental influence. Chapter 5 discusses the implications of these findings for understanding sexual orientation disparities in mental health and identifies several avenues for future research.

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