The brain is not an equal opportunities organ, it seems. An imaging study of Chinese and Caucasian people has found that their brains respond less strongly to the pain of strangers whose ethnicity is different when compared with strangers of their own race.
鈥淚t鈥檚 one of a string of papers that have come out in the cognitive neuroscience literature that helps us to understand some of the unfortunate ways in which racial group identity can influence our reactions to other people,鈥� says , a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the new study.
Previous research has shown that the amygdala, a brain area implicated in fear, responds more strongly to pictures of people whose ethnicity is different from the viewer鈥檚. But these responses aren鈥檛 uniform; other research has shown that activity in other brain areas can dampen the amygdala.
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To determine how ethnicity also sways the brain鈥檚 sense of empathy, and colleagues at Peking University in Beijing showed 17 Chinese and 16 Caucasians volunteers videos of a person being poked in the cheek with a Q-tip cotton bud or a hypodermic syringe, while the volunteers had their brains scanned on a functional MRI machine.
In pain
The films sparked activity in a region called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which also lights up when people are in pain themselves.
However, for Chinese volunteers the sight of another Chinese person in pain prompted more of an increase in ACC activity than the pain of a Caucasian person. Caucasian volunteers, from the US, Europe and Israel, also reacted more strongly to sight of another white person in pain.
Such automatic neural responses don鈥檛 necessarily translate into behaviour, cautions Farah. 鈥淛ust because there is this difference in ACC response it doesn鈥檛 mean that we are inevitably going to behave less empathically toward the other group.鈥�
Indeed, when Han鈥檚 team asked volunteers 鈥渉ow painful do you think the model feels?鈥� or 鈥渉ow unpleasant do you feel when observing the video clip?鈥� Chinese and Caucasians volunteers reported that they felt each other鈥檚 pain about equally.
Journal reference: , (in press)
