Paper Info
Title
Oxytocin receptor gene and racial ingroup bias in empathy-related brain activity.
Abstract
The human brain responds more strongly to racial ingroup than outgroup individuals' pain. This racial ingroup bias varies across individuals and has been attributed to social experiences. What remains unknown is whether the racial ingroup bias in brain activity is associated with a genetic polymorphism. We investigated genetic associations of racial ingroup bias in the brain activity to racial ingroup and outgroup faces that received painful or non-painful stimulations by scanning A/A and G/G homozygous of the oxytocin receptor gene polymorphism (OXTR rs53576) using functional MRI. We found that G/G compared to A/A individuals showed stronger activity in the anterior cingulate and supplementary motor area (ACC/SMA) in response to racial ingroup members' pain, whereas A/A relative to G/G individuals exhibited greater activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) in response to racial outgroup members' pain. Moreover, the racial ingroup bias in ACC/SMA activity positively predicted participants' racial ingroup bias in implicit attitudes and NAcc activity to racial outgroup individuals' pain negatively predicted participants' motivations to reduce racial outgroup members' pain. Our results suggest that the two variants of OXTR rs53576 are associated with racial ingroup bias in brain activities that are linked to implicit attitude and altruistic motivation, respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.01.042
NeuroImage
Keywords
Field
DocType
Oxytocin receptor gene,Empathy,Racial bias,fMRI
Empathy,Developmental psychology,Racism,Oxytocin receptor,In-group favoritism,Psychology,Implicit attitude,Brain activity and meditation,Outgroup,Ingroups and outgroups
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
110
1053-8119
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.40
7
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Siyang Luo131.09
Bingfeng Li230.75
Yina Ma3133.20
Wenxia Zhang430.75
Yi Rao530.75
Shihui Han613218.96