Brain study yields insight into machinery of...( By scanning subjects' brains while they...),Health

By scanning subjects' brains while they were thinking about people either politically like or different from them, researchers have found that different areas of the brain are active in the two cases. The researchers said their findings offer insight into the neural machinery that gives rise to perceptions that other racial or ethnic groups are different from one's own.

They concluded that their work offers insight into prejudice and that one way to reduce prejudice is to emphasize how alike different groups are, rather than highlighting their differences.

The researchers, Jason P. Mitchell and Mahzarin R. Banaji of Harvard University and C. Neil Macrae of University of Aberdeen, reported their findings in an article in the May 18, 2006, Neuron. Specifically, they sought to discover whether different areas of a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were active when people thought about those whom they perceived as either like or different from them.

Other researchers had implicated the mPFC as central to making inferences about other's mental states. And there had been hints in other studies that one mPFC subregion--the ventral region--seemed to be more engaged when people were performing tasks that involved thinking about their friends.

Mitchell and his colleagues theorized that the ventral mPFC might contribute to inferences about people similar to oneself, while its counterpart, the dorsal region, might be more involved in thinking about dissimilar people.

To explore this possibility, the researchers showed a group of Boston-area college students pictures of two people and gave the students written descriptions of each person. The students were told the people and descriptions were real, but they were designed to make the students either identify or not identify with the people. Specifically, one "target" person was described as having liberal views and taking part in activities typical of students at Nort
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Contact: Heidi Hardman
hhardman@cell.com
617-397-2879
Cell Press
17-May-2006

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