Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
J Neurosci. 2013 Aug 14;33(33):13484-8. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1272-13.2013.
In the current study, we investigated how complete infant deprivation to out-group race impacts behavioral and neural sensitivity to race. Although monkey models have successfully achieved complete face deprivation in early life, this is typically impossible in human studies. We overcame this barrier by examining youths with exclusively homogenous racial experience in early postnatal development. These were youths raised in orphanage care in either East Asia or Eastern Europe as infants and later adopted by American families. The use of international adoption bolsters confidence of infant exposure to race (e.g., to solely Asian faces or European faces). Participants completed an emotional matching task during functional MRI. Our findings show that deprivation to other-race faces in infancy disrupts recognition of emotion and results in heightened amygdala response to out-group faces. Greater early deprivation (i.e., later age of adoption) is associated with greater biases to race. These data demonstrate how early social deprivation to race shapes amygdala function later in life and provides support that early postnatal development may represent a sensitive period for race perception.
在当前的研究中，我们调查了完全剥夺婴儿与异族种族的接触会如何影响其对种族的行为和神经敏感性。尽管猴子模型在早期生活中成功地实现了完全的面部剥夺，但在人类研究中这通常是不可能的。我们通过研究在早期产后发育中经历完全同质种族经验的青少年来克服这一障碍。这些青少年在婴儿时期被安置在东亚或东欧的孤儿院中，后来被美国家庭收养。国际收养的使用增强了对婴儿接触种族（例如，仅接触亚洲面孔或欧洲面孔）的信心。参与者在功能磁共振成像期间完成了情绪匹配任务。我们的研究结果表明，婴儿期对异族面孔的剥夺会干扰对情绪的识别，并导致对外群面孔的杏仁核反应增强。早期剥夺程度越大（即收养年龄越大），与种族的偏见就越大。这些数据表明，早期的社会剥夺如何塑造成年后杏仁核的功能，并提供支持，表明产后早期发展可能是种族知觉的敏感时期。
