Mind racially tuned to fear black faces

IANS

LONDON: Racist stereotyping has programmed the brains of both black and white people to feel threatened by black faces, a controversial study suggests.

Scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles carried out brain scans of black and white Americans, focusing on a part of the brain called the amygdala - the area that reacts to threat and novelty - reports the Scottish daily Scotsman.

But because the region responds in different ways, the precise nature of what is happening was not previously clear.

Now researchers have investigated how the amygdalas of black and white volunteers reacted to facial images of people from both their own and each other's race - and found the brain's response linked to race-related prejudice.

A response to novelty is basically expected to be more pronounced in case of whites looking at black faces and vice versa than African-Americans shown images of black individuals. But scientists found that black faces caused a sharper response than white faces, for both white and black people.

The result suggested that feelings of fear or threat, rather than novelty, were at the root of the reaction, since black participants should not regard black faces as novel.

The researchers, led by Matthew Lieberman, believe that culturally learned negative associations could explain the findings.

Even black Americans had been taught to be wary of people of African race, the findings suggested.

" Although no single study can conclusively address this issue, the present study suggests that the amygdala activity typically associated with race-related processing may be a reflection of culturally learned negative associations regarding African-American individuals," the researchers wrote in a paper.

The study also found that verbally labelling faces as African-American reduced the amygdala activity in both groups. It was possible that putting race into words helped reduce its emotional impact, the authors said.

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