Forgiarini Matteo, Gallucci Marcello, Maravita Angelo
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca Milan, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2011 May 23;2:108. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00108. eCollection 2011.
Empathy is a critical function regulating human social life. In particular, empathy for pain is a source of deep emotional feelings and a strong trigger of pro-social behavior. We investigated the existence of a racial bias in the emotional reaction to other people's pain and its link with implicit racist biases. Measuring participants' physiological arousal, we found that Caucasian observers reacted to pain suffered by African people significantly less than to pain of Caucasian people. The reduced reaction to the pain of African individuals was also correlated with the observers' individual implicit race bias. The role of others' race in moderating empathic reactions is a crucial clue for understanding to what extent social interactions, and possibly integration, may be influenced by deeply rooted automatic and uncontrollable responses.
同理心是调节人类社会生活的一项关键功能。尤其是对疼痛的同理心，它是深层情感的来源，也是亲社会行为的强大触发因素。我们研究了在对他人疼痛的情感反应中是否存在种族偏见，以及它与隐性种族偏见的联系。通过测量参与者的生理唤醒水平，我们发现白人观察者对非洲人所遭受的疼痛的反应明显少于对白人疼痛的反应。对非洲人疼痛反应的减少也与观察者个人的隐性种族偏见相关。他人的种族在调节同理心反应中的作用是理解社会互动乃至融合在多大程度上可能受到根深蒂固的自动且无法控制的反应影响的关键线索。
