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Life

Black or white, the reaction is the same

By Anna Gosline

11 May 2005

SUBCONSCIOUS negative feelings or stereotypes about black people are learned through American culture, suggests the first brain imaging study to test both black and white people’s racial biases.

“I think the results are very specific to this society, where portrayals of African Americans are not very positive on average,” says Matthew Lieberman at the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the research.

Hidden prejudices have been revealed before with brain scans. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found that white Americans show more brain activity in a region called the amygdala when viewing images of black faces…

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