The Yin and Yang of racially (un)biased empathic responses to someone else’s pain

Introduction The ability to emphatically share feelings with those of someone in pain is affected by race difference between the target and the onlooker. A differential empathic activation for race (DEAR effect) in favour of the in-group members has been documented in the brain pain matrix (Azevedo et al., 2012; Xu, Zuo, Wang, & Han, 2009). However, we are also capable of unbiased responses to produce politically correct behaviours towards people of a different race. No brain signature for the politically correct responses has been described yet. Here we propose a neurocognitive model based on the interplay of two contrasting forces at the root of implicitly biased and explicitly unbiased empathic responses. Materials and Methods Twenty-four normal right-handed participants, 12 males (mean age=25.3 years, SD=4.81) were recruited among undergraduate university students. Before the fMRI scans, participants completed a Race (Black & White) Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess the implicit race biases in favour of Black people or White people (Greenwald et al., 1998). During the fMRI scan participants watched 40 shorts videos in which the actor’s left hand was touched by the experimenter, alternatively with a rubber eraser (harmless stimulus) or with a needle (harmful stimulus), followed by a 4 seconds still image of the hand/tool interaction (stimulus phase); finally a question mark appeared on the centre of the computer screen for 3 seconds (pain assessment phase). At this time, participants judged how painful was the actor’s experience using a Likert scale from 0 (not painful at all) to 3 (highly painful) by pressing an appropriate key on a multi-key response pad. The stimuli involved 20 actors, five for each gender and race (Caucasian & African). A factorial design was computed for all the participants in order to isolate at the single-subject level the brain regions showing a race-by-stimulus interaction effect, our effect of interest that we called “DEAR”: Di