An fMRI investigation of race-related amygdala activity in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals

• DOI: 10.1038/nn1465
• Publication Date: 2005-05-08T17:05:42Z
• Authors: Matthew D Lieberman; Ahmad Hariri; Johanna M Jarcho; Naomi I Eisenberger; Susan Y Bookheimer
• Keywords: Brain Mapping; Verbal Behavior; Culture; Emotions; Black People; Fear; Race Relations; Neuropsychological Tests; Amygdala; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Functional Laterality; White People; Black or African American; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Face; Auditory Perception; Humans; Habituation, Psychophysiologic; Photic Stimulation

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine the nature of amygdala sensitivity to race. Both African-American and Caucasian-American individuals showed greater amygdala activity to African-American targets than to Caucasian-American targets, suggesting that race-related amygdala activity may result from cultural learning rather than from the novelty of other races. Additionally, verbal encoding of African-American targets produced significantly less amygdala activity than perceptual encoding of African-American targets.