Effects Of Familiarity On Empathy For Racial Out-group Members

Empathy refers to the ability to understand and share others’emotion and it plays a key role in interpersonal relationships and social interaction. Previous studies have found that people tend to exhibit greater empathy to racial in-group members than to racial out-group members. However, racial in-group bias in empathy could be modulated by temporal cognitive strategies and experimental manipulations. Besides, research focusing on familiarity indicated that increase of familiarity not only enhanced empathy but also increased people’s preference for racial out-groups.In the present study, a within-subject design was adopted to investigate the effects of familiarity on empathy for racial out-groups. Twenty Chinese students participated and they were asked to familiarize with a group of western faces through several behavioral tasks. Then they performed a pain-judgment task according to the pictures depicting familiar and unfamiliar western faces in painful or non-painful situations during fMRI scanning.We found that unfamiliar vs. familiar western faces activated bilateral amygdala. Empathy for familiar westerners led to stronger activations in the left fusiform gyrus (FG) and right middle occipital gyrus (MOG). In addition, neural responses in the left FG were positively correlated with those in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and right anterior insula (AI) only when empathizing with familiar westerners. Empathy for unfamiliar westerners led to stronger activations in the right inferior parietal lobule (IPL).These results suggest that increase of familiarity reduces negative affective responses to racial out-groups. More importantly, visual familiarity gained through only fifteen minutes’training can also modulate people’s empathic neural responses toward racial out-groups. Enhanced early visual perception and face processing brought by familiar faces increase empathic neural responses toward familiar racial out-group members, while empathy for unfamiliar racial out-group members relies more heavily on perspective taking. Our findings provide inspiration to how to further eliminate racial in-group bias in empathy and promote cross-cultural cooperation.