Can a video game with a fictional minority group decrease intergroup biases towards non-fictional minorities? A social neuroscience study.

A critical scientific and societal challenge consists in developing and evaluating interventions that reduce prejudice towards outgroups. Video games appear to be a promising method but a number of falls in the current scientific literature prevents to fully understand the potential sizeable impact of video games on reducing prejudice. The present study investigated to what extent a video game designed to reduce prejudice towards minorities in a fictional society has the potential to reduce prejudice towards non-fictional minorities. Participants played either a recently developed game (Horns of Justice, HoJ) designed to reduce prejudice towards non-fictional minorities or a control game. After playing at home, participants performed two tasks in a lab context. We observed an overall positive effect of playing HoJ compared to the control game on attenuating prejudice towards an outgroup individual. We indeed observed that players of the control game had more midfrontal theta activity, reflecting more cognitive conflict, when they acted prosociality towards the outgroup participant and a lower neural response to the pain of the outgroup participant compared to the ingroup participant. These effects were attenuated for players of HoJ. We also observed that players of HoJ had a higher sense of agency when they decided to help the outgroup participant compared to when they did not help the outgroup participant, an effect not observable in players of the control game. These results are promising as they support evidence that using fictional characters in video game may induce positive changes on non-fictional individuals.

Community-level racial prejudice potentiates Whites’ neural responses to out-group faces: A spatial meta-analytic approach

A persistent question in social neuroscience is whether the amygdala underlies racial prejudice. Despite decades of research, evidence for a stronger amygdala response to racial out-group versus in-group members has been mixed. Here, we consider a potential explanation for these conflicting results: that neural responses to racial out-group members vary systematically based on the level of racial prejudice of the surrounding community. To test this contextual sensitivity hypothesis, we conducted a spatial meta-analysis that included a comprehensive set of studies (n=22) examining neural responses to Black vs. White faces in primarily White participants. We evaluated whether community-level racial prejudice moderated neural activation to Black (vs. White) faces by aggregating individual explicit racial attitudes, obtained from Project Implicit, to the county in which each study was conducted. Multi-level kernel density analysis demonstrated that neural activation to Black (vs. White) faces was significantly higher in the right amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in communities with higher (vs. lower) levels of racial prejudice. This same pattern of neural activation was not observed for income inequality or for the percentage of the population who was Black or college-educated, indicating specificity to community-level prejudice. Our findings highlight the potential utility of spatial meta-analyses for reconciling conflicting results in the social neuroscience literature by identifying features of the broader social context that may moderate neural responses to socially relevant stimuli.

Loneliness is linked to specific subregional alterations in hippocampus-default network co-variation

Social interaction complexity makes humans unique. But in times of social deprivation this strength risks to expose important vulnerabilities. Human social neuroscience studies have placed a premium on the default network (DN). In contrast, hippocampus (HC) subfields have been intensely studied in rodents and monkeys. To bridge these two literatures, we here quantified how DN subregions systematically co-vary with specific HC subfields in the context of subjective social isolation (i.e., loneliness). By co-decomposition using structural brain scans of ~40,000 UK Biobank participants, loneliness was specially linked to midline subregions in the uncovered DN patterns. These association cortex signatures coincided with concomitant HC patterns implicating especially CA1 and molecular layer. These patterns also showed a strong affiliation with the fornix white-matter tract and the nucleus accumbens. In addition, separable signatures of structural HC-DN co-variation had distinct associations with the genetic predisposition for loneliness at the population level.

ADHD, Self-Harm, and the Importance of Early Childhood Intervention - In Conversation with Dr. Melissa Mulraney

In this podcast, we talk to Dr. Melissa Mulraney, Senior Lecturer and co-leader of the Child Mental Health Research Centre at the Institute for Social Neuroscience in Melbourne, Australia, Honorary Research Fellow at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne, and Associate Editor of CAMH.

Subjective social isolation is linked to subregional alterations in hippocampus-default network co-variation

Social interaction complexity makes humans unique. But in times of social deprivation this strength risks to expose important vulnerabilities. Human social neuroscience studies have placed a premium on the default network (DN). In contrast, hippocampus (HC) subfields have been intensely studied in rodents and monkeys. To bridge these two literatures, we here quantified how DN subregions systematically co-vary with specific HC subfields in the context of subjective social isolation (i.e., loneliness). By co-decomposition using structural brain scans of ~40,000 UK Biobank participants, loneliness was specially linked to midline subregions in the uncovered DN patterns. These association cortex signatures coincided with concomitant HC patterns implicating especially CA1 and molecular layer. These patterns also showed a strong affiliation with the fornix white-matter tract and the nucleus accumbens. In addition, separable signatures of structural HC-DN co-variation had distinct associations with the genetic predisposition for loneliness at the population level.

Priors and Prejudice: How prior knowledge shapes intergroup perception

Bayesian processing has become a popular framework by which to understand cognitive processes. However, relatively little has been done to understand how Bayesian processing in the brain can be applied to understanding intergroup cognition. We assess how categorization and evaluation processes unfold based on priors about the ethnic outgroup being perceived. We then consider how the precision of prior knowledge about groups differentially influence perception depending on how the information about that group was learned affects the way in which it is recalled. Finally, we evaluate the mechanisms of how humans learn information about other ethnic groups and assess how the method of learning influences future intergroup perception. We suggest that a predictive processing framework for assessing prejudice could help accounting for seemingly disparate findings on intergroup bias from social neuroscience, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology. Such an integration has important implications for future research on prejudice at the interpersonal, intergroup, and societal levels.