← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · confederate_commando
Thread ID: 18436 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2005-05-28
2005-05-28 22:54 | User Profile
[LOL!!!-->SOUNDS LIKE EXPOSURE TO NEGROS CAUSES MENTAL PROBLEMS...]
Brain scan 'identifies race bias'
A brain scan that can apparently root out racists has been developed by scientists. The technique was used on white volunteers shown photographs of black individuals. In those with racist tendencies, a surge of activity was seen in part of the brain that controls thoughts and behaviour. Scientists believe this reflected volunteers' attempts to to curb their latent racism. After interacting with real black individuals, the same group performed poorly in a task designed to test mental resources.'
[url]http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_838829.html?menu=newslatestheadlines[/url]
2005-05-29 02:13 | User Profile
[B]Racial profiling: fMRI links brain activity and black-white bias[/B] AuntMinnie.com 5/27/05. AuntMinnie.com is a radiology newsletter.
"Most previous studies have not directly addressed ... the issue of whether African-American and Caucasian-American individuals produce similar or different amygdala responses to African-American and Caucasian-American faces," wrote Lieberman's group in Nature Neuroscience (May 8, 2005)." "In the whole-brain analysis, white participants produced greater amygdala activity to black targets than to white ones. Additionally, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, and the midbrain in the area of the substantia nigra were more active in response to black faces than white faces."
"But in an interesting twist, the researchers found that both groups produced a greater response in the right amygdala to black targets than to white ones. During perceptual encoding, African-American participants produced greater amygdala activity to black targets than white ones."
Lieberman told AuntMinnie.com that his group was initially surprised by this result.
"We had originally thought that African Americans would show a greater response to Caucasian faces," he wrote in an e-mail. "Once we obtained our results, however, we found a couple of studies (one by Dr. Robert Livingston and one by Brian Nosek, Ph.D.) showing a similar result in behavioral (non-fMRI) studies. So it turns out that our results are consistent with previous work" (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, July 2002, Vol. 38:4, pp. 405-413; Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, March 2002, Vol. 6:1, pp. 101-115)." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------* Sather_Gate: so to summarize: the amygdala [url]http://salmon.psy.plym.ac.uk/year2/aggression/amygdala-hippocampus.jpg[/url] is a part of the brain (actually an evolutionarily old part of the brain closely related to the ââ¬Åreptilianââ¬Â limbic system) which is activated in the emotion of fear, and this activity can be measured by functional MRI (fMRI). This is the research tool used by all the studies referenced here in AuntMinnie.com.
Liebermanââ¬â¢s group expected to find ââ¬Åprejudicialââ¬Â fear responses of whites to blacks, and of blacks to whites, but instead they found equal fear responses to blacks by both white and black subjects. They do some hand waving to explain this.
To me, the results suggest that these responses are biologically hard-wired or [B]instinctive[/B], and show the anatomical and physiological substrate of these instinctive responses. These instinctive responses take precedence over learned responses in both blacks and whites. They probably have an evolutionary survival value, just as the infant monkey fears the snake at first sight.
On the other hand, I read in the literature that one of the uses for fMRI and PET that these (government funded) psychology researchers plan is to help discover ââ¬Åabnormalââ¬Â brain function in (white) racists and measure the efficacy of ââ¬Åsensitivity trainingââ¬Â in functionally deprogramming such brains. God help us.
2005-06-05 08:06 | User Profile
[url=http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=5195]Link to National Vanguard article[/url]
Blacks, Whites Fear Blacks Equally: UCLA study finds where brain senses who's dangerous, who's not.
by Alex Wells
Recent scientific research may have provided an explanation for Jesse Jackson's "racist" feelings. In 1993 the Black leader confessed: ââ¬ÅThere is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robberyââ¬âthen look around and see somebody White and feel relieved.ââ¬Â
According to a report published in Nature Neuroscience on May 8, Blacks and Whites respond in very similar numbers (63 percent for Blacks, 64 percent for Whites) with expressions of alarm as measured in changes in the amygdala, the center in the human brain that arms the body against perceived threats, when viewing photographs of Blacks. Responses to similar pictures of Whites evoked much lower indicators of stress, according to Professor Matthew D. Lieberman, who headed the team that conducted the study at the University of California in Los Angeles (pictured). Not a single participant in the experiment perceived the White photos as more threatening than those of the Blacks.
Five out of eight Blacks (63 percent) responded with significantly more amygdala activity when presented with expressionless photographs of Blacks than when they were shown expressionless photographs of Whites, Lieberman and his colleagues found. Seven of 11 Caucasians (64 percent) in the study also responded with greater activity in the amygdala when viewing the Black photographs.
"We didn't see any differences in amygdala activity between the racial groups," Lieberman said. "From looking at the amygdala, you couldn't tell if the scans were from African American or Caucasian participants."
"Many people of either race may not be happy to find out that a part of their brain involved in responding to potential threats responds more to African Americans than Caucasians," Lieberman said. "Even people who believe to their core that they do not have prejudices may still have negative associations that are not conscious."
Why do Blacks show this amygdala response?
Lieberman was at a loss to answer this question, but offered a suggestion. "One theory," he said, "is that people are likely to pick up the stereotypes prevalent in a society regardless of whether their family or community agrees with those stereotypes. Several social psychologists have found evidence for this view. From an early age, cultural views, media portrayals and even the body language of authority figures may train our brains, whether we consciously agree or not."
The researchers also studied whether adding a verbal label (such as "African American") when viewing Black photos changes the amygdala response, and found it does.
"When people look at an African American and think of the word 'African American,' we no longer see the amygdala response," Lieberman said. Instead, the researchers found changes in a second region of the brain: the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. This region of the brain is located behind the forehead and eyes, and has been associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences; it also is associated with inhibiting behavior, impulses and emotions.
"This region is especially active when you add the verbal label to the face," Lieberman said. "The people who show the most activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex show the least activity in the amygdala.
"We found that when the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex gets turned on, the amygdala does not," he added. "When you engage in verbal labeling, that partially turns off or disrupts the amygdala response. The right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex was significantly active only when people were looking at African Americans and choosing the word 'African American.'"
These results suggest that "thinking about the race of others in words may regulate some of the threat experienced when confronting unfamiliar or feared others," Lieberman said.
The study, conducted at UCLA's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health.
Lieberman did not state why the term "African American," rather than "Black," "Negro" or some other term, was chosen as a verbal label for the photographs of Blacks. This necessarily raises the question of whether the usage of this particular term itself may have contributed to the activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that his research team noted.
The term "African American," interestingly, was coined by none other than the man who admitted in 1993 that he himself perceived Blacks as more threatening that Whites--Jesse Jackson. It was Jackson who pontificated in a televised speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention that "African American" was the name by which American Blacks should be known "from now on."
Usage of the term immediately became ubiquitous in the mass media, replacing "Black" as the standard term of reference for American Negroes. Bill Cosby even devoted an entire episode of his then high-rated TV sitcom "The Cosby Show" to promoting the term by having the actors use it repeatedly throughout the broadcast.
It is not hard to discern the objective of the campaign to replace the term "Black" with "African American." It seeks to place Black identity on a par with widely recognized White ethnicities such as Irish-American and Italian-American. Unlike the descendants of America's Irish and Italian immigrants, however, Blacks do not blend with the traditionally understood American nationality--a reality that cannot be overlooked even by people like Jackson.
Clearly the White race's opponents in the media saw the political value of mainstreaming the term "African American," hence the rush to promote it after Jackson's speech. Fostering a psychological parity between Black and White identities, after all, helps to subtly promote the amalgamation of the races.
Despite the absence of any explanation for why alternative words for "African American" were not used in the UCLA study to examine relative activity levels in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, there is still much that may be inferred from Lieberman et al's findings, although you'll have to look beyond the professor's myopic comments to do it.
At no point in any of his statements about the findings of his study of the amygdala does Lieberman--whose own ethnicity is evident from his name--suggest their obvious implications. If Blacks and Whites show a similar anxious reaction to Black faces--one which they do not experience when looking at images of Whites--might this not be simply how the brain has learned to respond to what personal, first-hand experience has taught the subjects of the study about Black aggressiveness? Most people who have extensive personal experience with both races can sense a difference in the aggressive tendencies of Blacks and Whites even if they have no scientific understanding of race.
The demonstrable correlation between aggressive behavior and testosterone levels becomes significant in a study like Lieberman's when one takes into account the higher average level of testosterone in Blacks than in Whites. Crime statistics reflect this difference, with Blacks committing a significantly higher percentage of criminal offenses than Whites, and males of all races committing more crimes than females, who have much lower testosterone levels.
Matthew Lieberman is a psychology professor with an interest in experimental research. He could hardly be ignorant of the role played by hormonal levels in aggressive behavior, just as he could hardly be ignorant of the ways in which the brain learns from first-hand experience. Yet what does he suggest as the cause of the reaction of nearly two-thirds of the subjects in his study of the amygdala to photographs of Blacks?
"ââ¬Â¦ [P]eople are likely to pick up the stereotypes prevalent in a society regardless of whether their family or community agrees with those stereotypes. Several social psychologists have found evidence for this view. From an early age, cultural views, media portrayals and even the body language of authority figures may train our brains, whether we consciously agree or not."
Personal experience is thus ignored entirely. The cause of the brain's differential responses can only be prejudice--institutionalized, widespread, and subtly learned--never mind the massive amounts of anti-racist propaganda to which everyone in America has been subjected for several decades running. No other explanation of the UCLA findings is apparently worthy of mention, as far as this Jewish psychologist is concerned.
That Lieberman found this subject interesting enough to make it a subject of scientific study perhaps tells us as much as his myopic suggestion of a cause for its findings. His experiment with the use of words to combat self-protective instinct likewise suggests much about his motives. In the end, his study may inadvertently tell us more about the psychology of Jews than it does of either Blacks or Whites.