Group membership and racial bias modulate the temporal estimation of in-group/out-group body movements

Social group categorization has been mainly studied in relation to ownership manipulations involving highly-salient multisensory cues. Here, we propose a novel paradigm that can implicitly activate the embodiment process in the presence of group affiliation information, whilst participants complete a task irrelevant to social categorization. Ethnically White participants watched videos of White- and Black-skinned models writing a proverb. The writing was interrupted 7, 4 or 1 s before completion. Participants were tasked with estimating the residual duration following interruption. A video showing only hand kinematic traces acted as a control condition. Residual duration estimates for out-group and control videos were significantly lower than those for in-group videos only for the longest duration. Moreover, stronger implicit racial bias was negatively correlated to estimates of residual duration for out-group videos. The underestimation bias for the out-group condition might be mediated by implicit embodiment, affective and attentional processes, and finalized to a rapid out-group categorization

Racial bias in neural empathic responses to pain

Recent studies have shown that perceiving the pain of others activates brain regions in the observer associated with both somatosensory and affective-motivational aspects of pain, principally involving regions of the anterior cingulate and anterior insula cortex. The degree of these empathic neural responses is modulated by racial bias, such that stronger neural activation is elicited by observing pain in people of the same racial group compared with people of another racial group. The aim of the present study was to examine whether a more general social group category, other than race, could similarly modulate neural empathic responses and perhaps account for the apparent racial bias reported in previous studies. Using a minimal group paradigm, we assigned participants to one of two mixed-race teams. We use the term race to refer to the Chinese or Caucasian appearance of faces and whether the ethnic group represented was the same or different from the appearance of the participant' own face. Using fMRI, we measured neural empathic responses as participants observed members of their own group or other group, and members of their own race or other race, receiving either painful or non-painful touch. Participants showed clear group biases, with no significant effect of race, on behavioral measures of implicit (affective priming) and explicit group identification. Neural responses to observed pain in the anterior cingulate cortex, insula cortex, and somatosensory areas showed significantly greater activation when observing pain in own-race compared with other-race individuals, with no significant effect of minimal groups. These results suggest that racial bias in neural empathic responses is not influenced by minimal forms of group categorization, despite the clear association participants showed with in-group more than out-group members. We suggest that race may be an automatic and unconscious mechanism that drives the initial neural responses to observed pain in others

Social Constraints on the Direct Perception of Emotions and Intentions

In this paper, we first review recent arguments about the direct perception of the intentions and emotions of others, emphasizing the role of embodied interaction. We then consider a possible objection to the direct perception hypothesis from social psychology, related to phenomena like 'dehumanization' and 'implicit racial bias', which manifest themselves on a basic bodily level. On the background of such data, one might object that social perception cannot be direct since it depends on and can in fact be interrupted by a set of cultural beliefs. We argue, however, that far from threatening the idea of direct perception, these findings clearly contradict the idea of hardwired theory of mind modules. More generally, we suggest that in order to further the understanding of social cognition we must take seriously insights about in-group and out-group distinctions and related phenomena, all of which are currently neglected in the mainstream social cognition literature.Peer reviewe