Ever wonder why you have difficulty guessing the ages of foreigners, or why their facial expressions are just so damn inscrutable?
Maybe it’s due to brain activity!
Or so reports the Chosun Ilbo, citing the results of a research team led by Lee Kyoung-uk of Uijeongbu’s St. Mary’s Hospital neurology department.
Using F-MRI, the team found that in reading the happy and sad expressions of people of the same race, the areas of the brain that deal with emotion (i.e., the amygdala and hippocampus) were strongly activated.
When reading the facial expressions of foreigners of a different race, however, the parts of the brain that deal with detecting and evaluating stimulus (i.e., the frontal, occipital, and parietal lobes) were activated.
So, basically, what they discovered is that when looking at the facial expression of a person of the same race, the parts of the brain that deal with emotion turn on automatically, while when looking at foreigner faces, it’s a two-step process to figure out what the barbarians are feeling, including an initial logical process.
Lee said his team’s findings were significant since if explains in terms of brain phenomenon the emotional psychological process that can occur in inter-racial person-to-person relationships.
Oh, the results were also printed in the July issue of Neuroreport — the abstract can be read here.
(HT to Oranckay)
28 Comments
I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand the ultimate purpose of such
research. Is it to prove that humans are all totally unrelated; that we are
a collection of “races”? (And, by the way, we really gotta stop using this
totally outdated term people . . . “the White Race”. . . “the Korean race” . . .
“the German race” . . . “the African race” all of these make no sense whatsoever, particularly in a biological sense).
Further, a sincere smile now is no longer automatically universal? A frown is something which must be processed according to where one was born? A furrowed brow can only be interpretted by citizens of certain nations as being a sign of anger or disappointment? Whatever . . . (I know all of my fellow members of our great North American race understand the emotions I am trying to convey;
those of all other races–like the English race, Australian race, or New Zealand race–can kiss my ancestrally royal, pure-ivory white, racially superior behind, because you could never understand.)
I’d be interested to know whether results are different in people who have spent a long time living among people of different races, or people of mixed race.
Judging by the vacuous 2-minute-long stares I get from adjoshis even after I return a pointedly unhappy glare, I’d say that for some it’s more like a 12-stepper.
Yeah, that is such a crock. It is about familiarity and learned tasks. Do this on people from multicultural backgrounds and there will be a wider range of faces that do not require frontal processing.
Only scientists in a largely monoracial culture could think that is the conclusion or even have such a flawed study of this.
But I guess that is why Robert put it up here, well played sir, well played.
#4,
“Only scientists in a largely monoracial culture could think that is the conclusion or even have such a flawed study of this.”
Yes, but don’t discredit the research because its conclusions are flawed. Good research opens the doors to other questions, which this one certainly does. It begs for additional research to show that it’s not about race itself but rather familiarity (cultural, social, and interpersonal).
Abstract:
We investigated the neural basis underlying the effect of race on incidental facial emotional processing using functional MRI. Thirteen healthy Korean men underwent functional MRI while viewing photographs of Korean (own-race) and Caucasian (other-race) emotional faces while performing a sex discrimination task. Responses to other-race relative to own-race neutral faces replicated previous studies: activations were obtained in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex/medial frontal cortex. Direct contrasts between-race emotional faces (happy and sad) also showed differential effects: the contrast of own-race relative to other-race had more activations in limbic areas (amygdala and hippocampus), whereas the contrast of other-race relative to own-race had more activations in frontal, occipital, and parietal lobes. Our findings provide evidence for differential processing of emotional faces as a function of race.
http://www.neuroreport.com/pt/.....MvJdk9Dvc1!-1586968322!181195628!8091!-1
“Judging by the vacuous 2-minute-long stares I get from adjoshis even after I return a pointedly unhappy glare, I’d say that for some it’s more like a 12-stepper.”
You must be doing something wrong hoju_saram.
Three words.
Deportment
Possibly. Although it’s interesting to compare with the Scottish research on face recognition:
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2008/.....t-my-nose/
Some people were saying on here a while back about how racial prejudice is biological, or at least “pre-programmed”. I can’t remember who it was and exactly what they were saying.
I concur with the questions raised by roboseyo and inkevitch. If one raises a biologically Korean child from birth in an exclusively Caucasian environment, does she grow up having problems recognising Caucasians or Koreans?
I want to bet it is the latter. Anyone done a study?
Metropolitician has written a number of thesis on this topic, his page is in a link to the left. He has never done any research though.
I wish people would put these concepts (race and recognition) into the context it belongs: cultural anthropology. We recognize things as familiar when we compare them to our own initial environment. Which means “another race” refers to someone who looks markedly different than our mothers. And I would bet against eujin if the Korean in question was birthed and raised by a Korean mother for a certain period.
Bipolar Mindscrew,
I wouldn’t be betting against you in your scenario. I was talking about adopting a child and raising it away from its biological parents. Child, from birth, exclusively…
kerplunk,
I went looking for Metro’s thoughts on this subject. Couldn’t find them. He talks about life being like the Matrix. Is that what you mean?
No, his life being like the matrix comment is about something else. You need to look at his other scholarly work on star wars and tarantino films, especially the doctoral-level paper on star trek and racial identity politics
#11 Bipolar Mindscrew said what I was going to say. It’s about a biological (neurological) reaction to an environmental (cultural) difference.
Western researchers have also studied human reactions to faces of different races. At a workshop on the brain and learning, Dr. Spencer Kagan explained the function of the amygdala and situations in which it fires more actively. One of them was seeing the face of a person of a different race. Another was seeing an unfamiliar versus familiar face. So if you are gazing at the face of a friend or lover of a different race, which circumstance rules - race or familiarity? My guess is familiarity.
More Korean trash science.
eujin:” Some people were saying on here a while back about how racial prejudice is biological, or at least “pre-programmed”. I can’t remember who it was and exactly what they were saying.”
That, too, is patent nonsense. But I recall that the misaplication of irrelevent science was used to justify the conclusion. I’ve observed that this kind of eggregius scientism is rampant in Korea.
“So, basically, what they discovered is that when looking at the facial expression of a person of the same race, the parts of the brain that deal with emotion turn on automatically, while when looking at foreigner faces, it’s a two-step process to figure out what the barbarians are feeling, including an initial logical process.”
Questionable and irrelevent. All the exposure to Western media should eliminate this as an excuse for the kind of anti-foreign ignorance that prevails.
My empirical research tells me that it’s willful ignorance fueled by deeply indoctrinated prejudice.
Yes, Mizar, although I do not recall exactly, I think it was Sonagi that was saying something along those lines.
It makes sense that a ‘different’ face automatically raises alarm (the argument that racism is born out of the natural instinct to view unfamiliarity with hostility), but I guess the problem I would raise against the conclusion is that the research does not clarify whether ‘racial difference’ is distinguishable from just plain difference (does genetic plays into this on both the stimulus and response?). Doesn’t mean it’s trash science, it means that’s the next step.
In fact, the study is in tune with the field of evolutionary psychology (basically, behavior = adaptation) - in particular the concept of inclusive fitness (your relatives contribute to your fitness). The professors who study/teach this field at ASU? Surprisingly, not Korean (… though one of them is Austrian… damn).
This study jus further alienates Koreans from other human beings if it was only done by using Koreans looking at foreigners. It reinforces the stigma that out of all people on Earth, the people from that small peninsula are unable to adapt to differentness more than others. This falls so hard into the hands of the foreign coined term “the Korean Stare” that it is sad.
This study just further alienates Koreans from other human beings if it was only done by using Koreans looking at foreigners. It reinforces the stigma that out of all people on Earth, the people from that small peninsula are unable to adapt to differentness more than others. This falls so hard into the hands of the foreign coined term “the Korean Stare” that it is sad.
Differences in cognitive function between one’s own race and a different race are common in neuroscientific study. This is not Korean trash science and it’s not at all just Koreans that do it, so this study will not “further alienate Koreans from other human beings”. Here’s a 2001 Stanford study by Alexandra J. Golby, John D. E. Gabrieli, Joan Y. Chiao and Jennifer L. Eberhardt.
Nature Neuroscience, volume 4, number 8, 2001
There’s a lot we don’t know about the brain and so some simple difference is used when we want to find responses to different stimuli, like gender or race. The next step is to see if the different reactions to different races is lessened if one is equally familiar with a different raced person, like we would find in an interracial marriage or a cross-racial adoptee.
@Eujin:
I have posted previously comments similar to the remarks I made earlier in this thread. I did not say that “… racial prejudice is biological, or at least “pre-programmed.” I said in this comment that “xenophobia is hard-wired into our brains.” Xenophobia, or fear of foreigners, is not the same as racial prejudice, and the amygdala consider other factors such as familiarity in sizing up another human being. I would expect people living in a multiracial environment to react less to seeing a person of a different ethnic group or race, provided they haven’t acquired any specific prejudices about that group.
To follow up, I am reminded of a story told to me by a German language instructor. She said that her grandmother was riding her bicycle shortly after the end of WWII and literally fell off upon seeing for the first time an African-American soldier. That’s not racial prejudice; that’s xenophobia.
I think people have forgotten the amount of xenophobia that was present during the 70’s and to a certain degree the 80’s.
Its a normal phenomena and it occurs in a similar fashion to when you see something you’ve never seen before.
Sonagi,maybe her inner ear had been affected during all the aerial bombing and her sense of balance was off.
Or the soldier had a super schlong.