scholarly journals Neighborhood racial demographics predict infants’ neural responses to people of different races

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyesung G. Hwang ◽  
Ranjan Debnath ◽  
Marlene Meyer ◽  
Virginia C. Salo ◽  
Nathan A. Fox ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Responses ◽  
Racial Demographics

scholarly journals Neighborhood racial demographics predict infants’ neural responses to people of different races

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyesung Grace Hwang ◽  
Ranjan Debnath ◽  
Marlene Meyer ◽  
Virginia C. Salo ◽  
Nathan Fox ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
First Year ◽  
Mu Rhythm ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Racially Diverse ◽  
Social Bias ◽  
Alpha Asymmetry ◽  
First Year Of Life ◽  
Preverbal Infants ◽  
Racial Demographics

Early in life, greater exposure to diverse people can change the tendency to prefer one’s own social group. For instance, infants from racially diverse environments show less preference for their own-race (ingroup) over other-race (outgroup) faces than infants from racially homogeneous environments. Yet how social environment changes ingroup versus outgroup demarcation in infancy is unclear. A commonly held assumption is that early emerging ingroup preference is based on an affective process: feeling more comfortable with familiar ingroup than unfamiliar outgroup members. However, other processes may also underlie ingroup preference: Infants may attend more to ingroup than outgroup members and/or mirror the actions of ingroup over outgroup individuals. By aggregating 7- to 12-month-old infants’ electroencephalography (EEG) activity across three studies, we disambiguate these different processes in the EEG oscillations of preverbal infants according to social environment. White infants from more racially diverse neighborhoods exhibited greater frontal theta oscillation (an index of top-down attention) and more mu rhythm desynchronization (an index of motor system activation and potentially neural mirroring) to racial outgroup individuals than White infants from less racially diverse neighborhoods. Neighborhood racial demographics did not relate to White infants’ frontal alpha asymmetry (a measure of approach-withdrawal motivation) toward racial outgroup individuals. Racial minority infants showed no effects of neighborhood racial demographics in their neural responses to racial outgroup individuals. These results indicate that neural mechanisms that may underlie social bias and prejudices are related to neighborhood racial demographics in the first year of life.

Specificity of Neural Responses to Emotion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke J. Chang ◽  
Peter J. Gianaros ◽  
Steve Manuck ◽  
Anjali Krishnan ◽  
Tor D. Wager
Keyword(s):  
Neural Responses

What you morph is not what you get: Subjective and neural responses to facial expressions of emotion depend on perceived intensity/arousal (not on amount of morphing)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Ferreira-Santos ◽  
Mariana R. Pereira ◽  
Tiago O. Paiva ◽  
Pedro R. Almeida ◽  
Eva C. Martins ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Electrophysiological Study ◽  
Objective Measure ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Supporting Evidence ◽  
Emotional Intensity ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Facial Stimuli ◽  
Facial Expressions Of Emotion ◽  
Processing Techniques

The behavioral and electrophysiological study of the emotional intensity of facial expressions of emotions has relied on image processing techniques termed ‘morphing’ to generate realistic facial stimuli in which emotional intensity can be manipulated. This is achieved by blending neutral and emotional facial displays and treating the percent of morphing between the two stimuli as an objective measure of emotional intensity. Here we argue that the percentage of morphing between stimuli does not provide an objective measure of emotional intensity and present supporting evidence from affective ratings and neural (event-related potential) responses. We show that 50% morphs created from high or moderate arousal stimuli differ in subjective and neural responses in a sensible way: 50% morphs are perceived as having approximately half of the emotional intensity of the original stimuli, but if the original stimuli differed in emotional intensity to begin with, then so will the morphs. We suggest a re-examination of previous studies that used percentage of morphing as a measure of emotional intensity and highlight the value of more careful experimental control of emotional stimuli and inclusion of proper manipulation checks.

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