The neuroscience of race

Abstract

As the racial composition of the population changes, intergroup interactions are increasingly common. To understand how we perceive and categorize race and the attitudes that flow from it, scientists have used brain imaging techniques to examine how social categories of race and ethnicity are processed, evaluated and incorporated in decision-making. We review these findings, focusing on black and white race categories. A network of interacting brain regions is important in the unintentional, implicit expression of racial attitudes and its control. On the basis of the overlap in the neural circuitry of race, emotion and decision-making, we speculate as to how this emerging research might inform how we recognize and respond to variations in race and its influence on unintended race-based attitudes and decisions.

Neural correlates of emotion perception depending on culture and gaze direction

“…Previous research suggested that this region plays an important role in emotion reappraisal and regulation (Golkar et al 2012). This is further supported by findings that show dlPFC engagement in a regulatory mechanism that controlled implicit and potentially unwanted racial associations and racially biased responses in previous cross cultural studies (Ito and Bartholow 2009;Kubota et al 2012). In order to investigate the neural correlates of automatic and controlled social evaluation, Cunningham et al (2004) presented European-American participants who reported a strong motivation to control prejudice with either subliminal (30 ms) or 525 ms presentations of pictures of European-American and African-American faces.…”

Learning Empathy Through Virtual Reality: Multiple Strategies for Training Empathy-Related Abilities Using Body Ownership Illusions in Embodied Virtual Reality

“…At least three different strategies can be implemented in these cases (for review on the strategies listed see Kubota et al, 2012):…”

The Neuroscience of Intergroup Relations

“…This interdisciplinary approach-termed social neuroscience ( To date, intergroup and cultural neuroscience has largely focused on specific social groups rather than studying the dynamics that govern group formation and intergroup interactions. Several excellent reviews have examined the neural basis of social categorization along boundaries marked by visual cues to targets' group membership, such as race, sex, and age (e.g., Eberhardt, 2005;Ito & Bartholow, 2009;Kubota et al, 2012); however, broader inferences The neuroscience of intergroup relations 5 about group processes are often difficult to make on the basis of these social categories due to confounding variables (e.g., differences in the visual appearance of target stimuli, associated stereotypes and prejudices, and perceivers' personal experience with groups in question).…”

“…This interdisciplinary approach-termed social neuroscience ( To date, intergroup and cultural neuroscience has largely focused on specific social groups rather than studying the dynamics that govern group formation and intergroup interactions. Several excellent reviews have examined the neural basis of social categorization along boundaries marked by visual cues to targets' group membership, such as race, sex, and age (e.g., Eberhardt, 2005;Ito & Bartholow, 2009;Kubota et al, 2012); however, broader inferences The neuroscience of intergroup relations 5 about group processes are often difficult to make on the basis of these social categories due to confounding variables (e.g., differences in the visual appearance of target stimuli, associated stereotypes and prejudices, and perceivers' personal experience with groups in question).Furthermore, research that focuses exclusively on a single, static category boundary fails to account fully for the flexible nature of social identity representation (e.g., the effects of context on self-categorization, the effects of task on person construal; Freeman & Ambady, 2011). Thus, the next phase of intergroup neuroscience research must account for the fact that not all outgroups are equivalent, not all group memberships are static, and which group identities are salient is highly context dependent (Turner, Oakes, Haslam, & McGarty, 1994).…”

“…As many models of person perception posit, this problem is magnified by the The neuroscience of intergroup relations 7 fact that the process of categorizing others according to their age, gender, or race can be reflexive and difficult to override (Brewer, 1988;Devine, 1989;Ito & Urland, 2005; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000;Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman, 1978). To help understand how people perceive and evaluate targets from different social categories, scientists have used neuroimaging and other psychophysiological methods to examine how social categories are represented, evaluated, and integrated with ongoing psychological processes (see Amodio, 2008;Eberhardt, 2005; Ito & Barthalow, 2009;Kubota et al, 2012;Phelps & Thomas, 2003;Wheeler & Fiske, 2005).This relatively recent application of neuroscience to the study of social categorization has already provided important insights into the specific component processes that underlie intergroup categorization (e.g., Golby, Gabrieli, Chiao, & Eberhardt, 2001), evaluation (e.g., Phelps et al, 2000), and motivation (e.g., Amodio et al, 2004), and illuminated the time course of intergroup processing (e.g., Cunningham, Van Bavel, Arbuckle, Packer, & Waggoner, 2012;Ito & Urland, 2003. Social group memberships do indeed impact neural processes automatically and unconsciously and these processes have important implications for discriminatory behavior .…”