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Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17399-brains-response-muted-when-we-see-other-races-in-pain.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Brain's response muted when we see other races in pain

• 14:20 01 July 2009 by Ewen Callaway
• For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide

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.

"It's 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," says Martha Farah, 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's. But these responses aren't uniform; other research has shown that activity in other brain areas can dampen the amygdala.

To determine how ethnicity also sways the brain's sense of empathy, Shihui Han 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.

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