Do You Feel My Pain? Racial Group Membership Modulates Empathic Neural Responses

By Xiaojing Xu, Xiangyu Zuo, Xiaoying Wang, Shihui Han. Journal of Neuroscience, 2009

683 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f68de3ca3bb5f86fa650751cf736ae019d9e3a2

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Citations in the corpus

Language as a Tool for Interacting Minds (2010, background): “The altruism that we show to members of our in-group does not extend to members of other groups (Sober and Wilson, 1998; Fehr et al., 2008; Xu et al., 2009).”
An Evolutionary Approach to Emotional Communication (2013, background): “It would be extremely surprising if themechanisms designed to detect and react to the emotional expression were still only targeting that cue.”
The Distinctive Effects of Empathy and Hope in Intractable Conflicts (2017, background): “…body of literature indicates that empathic responses are biased or absent when dealing with members of an out-group, leading to reduced prosocial behaviors (e.g., Avenanti, Sirigu, and Aglioti 2010; Chiao 2011; Cikara, Bruneau, and Saxe 2011; Tarrant, Dazeley, and Cottom 2009; Xu et al. 2009).”
Descriptions of Pain, Metaphor, and Embodied Simulation (2010, background): “( Xu, Zuo, Wang, & Han, 2009 ) provide evidence that the amount of activation in the affective areas of the pain matrix during exposure to others' pain may be lower when the stimuli involve members of a different racial group from that of the subjects.”
Not so Fast. On Some Bold Neuroscientific Claims Concerning Human Agency (2010, background): “A relevant contribution in this sense can derive, for example, by studies that show that people (even well-intentioned people who sincerely try to overcome their prejudices) tend to sympathize with members of their own ethnic group whatever the circumstances are and, in situations of danger or stres”
Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy (2011, background): “When an outgroup is perceived as antagonistic, people respond less empathically to outgroup members but also more empathically to ingroup members (Dovidio et al., 2010; see, however, Xu et al., 2009 for a positive correlation between ingroup and outgroup empathic resonance).”
Neural basis of extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation (2010, background): “Finally, a recent study demonstrated that people have increased activity within the supplementary motor area, ACC, and lateral frontal cortices when viewing same- relative to other-race faces receiving a painful stimulus relative to another-race face (Xu et al., 2009).”