How white and black bodies are perceived depends on what emotion is expressed

Rebecca Watson,Beatrice De Gelder

doi:10.1038/srep41349

Abstract

Body language is a powerful indicator of others’ emotions in social interactions, with positive signals triggering approach and negative ones retreat and defensiveness. Intergroup and interracial factors can influence these interactions, sometimes leading to aggressive or even violent behaviour. Despite its obvious social relevance however, the interaction between body expression and race remains unexplored, with explanations of the impact of race being almost exclusively based on the role of race in face recognition. In the current fMRI study we scanned white European participants while they viewed affective (angry and happy) body postures of both same race (white) and other race (black) individuals. To assess the difference between implicit and explicit recognition participants performed either an explicit emotion categorisation task, or an irrelevant shape judgement task. Brain activity was modulated by race in a number of brain regions across both tasks. Race-related activity appeared to be task- as well as emotion- specific. Overall, the other-race effects appeared to be driven by positive emotions, while same-race effects were observed for negative emotions. A race specific effect was also observed in right amygdala reflecting increased activation for explicit recognition of angry white body expressions. Overall, these results provide the first clear evidence that race influences affective body perception.

Highlights

Body language is a powerful indicator of others’ emotions in social interactions, with positive signals triggering approach and negative ones retreat and defensiveness
Two brain regions associated with face perception – the lateral fusiform gyrus, the ‘fusiform face area’ (FFA)[7], and the posterior cingulate cortex – tend to
We confirmed that race does influence brain responses to images of affective body expressions

Summary

Introduction

Body language is a powerful indicator of others’ emotions in social interactions, with positive signals triggering approach and negative ones retreat and defensiveness. Despite its obvious social relevance the interaction between body expression and race remains unexplored, with explanations of the impact of race being almost exclusively based on the role of race in face recognition. A race specific effect was observed in right amygdala reflecting increased activation for explicit recognition of angry white body expressions. Overall, these results provide the first clear evidence that race influences affective body perception. The few explanations of the impact of race on social interactions are almost exclusively based on studies of face perception. Two brain regions associated with face perception – the lateral fusiform gyrus, the ‘fusiform face area’ (FFA)[7], and the posterior cingulate cortex – tend to www.nature.com/scientificreports/

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