University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dev Psychopathol. 2018 Dec;30(5):1837-1848. doi: 10.1017/S0954579418000949. Epub 2018 Sep 7.
Adolescence is a sensitive period for sociocultural development in which facets of social identity, including social status and race, become especially salient. Despite the heightened importance of both social status and race during this developmental period, no known work has examined how individual differences in social status influence perceptions of race in adolescents. Thus, in the present study, we investigated how both subjective social status and objective socioeconomic status (SES) influence neural responses to race. Twenty-three Mexican American adolescents (15 females; mean age = 17.22 years) were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed Black and White faces in a standard labeling task. Adolescents rated their subjective social status in US society, while their parents responded to questions about their educational background, occupation, and economic strain (objective SES). Results demonstrated a negative association between subjective social status and neural responses in the amygdala, fusiform face area, and medial prefrontal cortex when adolescents viewed Black (relative to White) faces. In other words, adolescents with lower subjective social status showed greater activity in neural regions involved in processing salience, perceptual expertise, and thinking about the minds of others when they viewed images of Black faces, suggesting enhanced salience of race for these youth. There was no relationship between objective SES and neural responses to the faces. Moreover, instructing participants to focus on the gender or emotion expression on the face attenuated the relationship between subjective social status and neural processing of race. Together, these results demonstrate that subjective social status shapes the way the brain responds to race, which may have implications for psychopathology.
青春期是社会文化发展的敏感时期，社会认同的各个方面，包括社会地位和种族，变得尤为突出。尽管在这个发展时期社会地位和种族都变得尤为重要，但目前还没有已知的研究探讨个体社会地位差异如何影响青少年对种族的看法。因此，在本研究中，我们调查了主观社会地位和客观社会经济地位（SES）如何影响对种族的神经反应。我们使用功能磁共振成像对 23 名墨西哥裔美国青少年（15 名女性；平均年龄=17.22 岁）进行了扫描，让他们在标准的标签任务中观看黑人和白人的面孔。青少年对自己在美国社会中的主观社会地位进行评分，而他们的父母则回答有关其教育背景、职业和经济压力（客观 SES）的问题。结果表明，当青少年观看黑人（相对于白人）面孔时，主观社会地位与杏仁核、梭状回面孔区和内侧前额叶皮质的神经反应呈负相关。换句话说，主观社会地位较低的青少年在观看黑人面孔时，大脑中与处理显著性、感知专长和思考他人心理有关的区域活动增加，表明这些年轻人对种族的显著性增强。客观 SES 与对面孔的神经反应之间没有关系。此外，指示参与者关注面孔的性别或表情表达，会减弱主观社会地位与种族神经加工之间的关系。综上所述，这些结果表明，主观社会地位塑造了大脑对种族的反应方式，这可能对精神病理学有影响。
