Human brain recognizes and reacts to race
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Monday, April 26, 2010
The human brain fires differently when dealing with people outside of one's own race, according to new research out of the University of Toronto Scarborough.
This research, conducted by social neuroscientists at UofT Scarborough, explored the sensitivity of the "mirror-neuron-system" to race and ethnicity. The researchers had study participants view a series of videos while hooked up to electroencephalogram (EEG) machines. The participants – all white – watched simple videos in which men of different races picked up a glass and took a sip of water. They watched white, black, South Asian and East Asian men perform the task.
Typically, when people observe others perform a simple task, their motor cortex region fires similarly to when they are performing the task themselves. However, the UofT research team, led by PhD student Jennifer Gutsell and Assistant Professor Dr. Michael Inzlicht, found that participants' motor cortex was significantly less likely to fire when they watched the visible minority men perform the simple task. In some cases when participants watched the non-white men performing the task, their brains actually registered as little activity as when they watched a blank screen.
"Previous research shows people are less likely to feel connected to people outside their own ethnic groups, and we wanted to know why," says Gutsell. "What we found is that there is a basic difference in the way peoples' brains react to those from other ethnic backgrounds. Observing someone of a different race produced significantly less motor-cortex activity than observing a person of one's own race. In other words, people were less likely to mentally simulate the actions of other-race than same-race people"
The trend was even more pronounced for participants who scored high on a test measuring subtle racism, says Gutsell.
"The so-called mirror-neuron-system is thought to be an important building block for empathy by allowing people to 'mirror' other people's actions and emotions; our research indicates that this basic building block is less reactive to people who belong to a different race than you," says Inzlicht.
However, the team says cognitive perspective taking exercises, for example, can increase empathy and understanding, thereby offering hope to reduce prejudice. Gutsell and Inzlicht are now investigating if this form of perspective-taking can have measurable effects in the brain.
The team's findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
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University of Toronto
Thanks to University of Toronto for this article. -
Race and empathy matter on neural level
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Race matters on a neurological level when it comes to empathy for African-Americans in distress, according to a new Northwestern University study.
In a rare neuroscience look at racial minorities, the study shows that African-Americans showed greater empathy for African-Americans facing adversity – in this case for victims of Hurricane Katrina – than Caucasians demonstrated for Caucasian-Americans in pain.
"We found that everybody reported empathy toward the Hurricane Katrina victims," said Joan Y. Chiao, assistant professor of psychology and author of the study. "But African-Americans additionally showed greater empathic response to other African-Americans in emotional pain."
The more African-Americans identified as African-American the more likely they were to show greater empathic preference for African-Americans, the study showed.
Initially, Chiao thought that both African-Americans and Caucasian-Americans would either show no pattern of in-group bias or both show some sort of preference.
The take-home point to Chiao: our ability to identify with another person dramatically changes how much we can feel the pain of another and how much we're willing to help them.
"It's just that feeling of that person is like me, or that person is similar to me," she said. "That experience can really lead to what we're calling 'extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation.' It's empathy and altruistic motivation above and beyond what you would do for another human."
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the study included an equal number of African-American and Caucasian-American study participants. They were shown pictures depicting either African-American or Caucasian-American individuals in a painful (i.e. in the midst of a natural disaster) or neutral (attending an outdoor picnic).
"We think this is really interesting because it suggests mechanisms by which we can enhance our empathy and altruistic motivation simply by finding ways in which we have commonality across individuals and across groups," Chiao said.
Chiao, who works at one of only two labs in the world dedicated to cultural and social neuroscience, is particularly interested in how social identities related to gender or race modulate the biological process underlying feeling and reason. (The Web address for the Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern is http://culturalneuro.psych.northwestern.edu/Lab_Website/Welcome.html).
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Northwestern University
Thanks to Northwestern University for this article.