Brains of both black and white people have been programmed by racist stereotyping

May 10 2005

A controversial new study is suggesting that the brains of both black and white people have been programmed by racist stereotyping to feel threatened by black faces.

Scientists at the University of California, 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, and, because the region responds in different ways, exactly what goes on in that area was unclear.

The researchers 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 was linked to race-related prejudice.

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

This result does suggest 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.

Lead researcher Matthew Lieberman, believes that culturally learned negative associations could explain the findings and he says that it appears that even black Americans had been taught to be wary of people of African race.

In conclusion the researchers say that the 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.

They 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.