Heart Rate Variability reveals the fight between racially biased and politically correct behaviour

Abstract

In this study, we explored vagally-mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) responses, a psychophysiological index of cognitive self-regulatory control, to map the dynamics associated with empathic responses for pain towards an out-group member. Accordingly, Caucasian participants were asked to judge the experience of African and Caucasian actors touched with either a neutral or a harmful stimulus. Results showed that (1) explicit judgment of pain intensity in African actors yielded higher rating score and (2) took longer time compared to Caucasian actors, (3) these behavioural outcomes were associated with a significant increment of RMSSD, Log-HF-HRV and HF-HRV n.u., (4) resting HF-HRV n.u. predicted the participants’ lag-time to judge painful stimulations delivered to African actors. Interestingly, these dynamics were associated with a measure of implicit racial attitudes and were, in part, abolished when participants performed a concurrent task during videos presentation. Taken together our results support the idea that a cognitive effort is needed to self-regulate our implicit attitude as predicted by the ‘Contrasting Forces Model’.

The biased hand. Mouse-tracking metrics to examine the conflict processing in a race-implicit association test

“…Differently from previous experimental works which have adopted the MT approach in an IAT structure [ 31 , 32 ], we decided to use a classical within-subject design to have the chance to directly compare participants’ performance gathered in a standard keyboard-response race-IAT (RT-race-IAT) with the MT one. Accordingly, from a behavioural point of view, our participants obtained a mean RT-race-IAT D score of 1.08, indicating, on average, a pro-White implicit bias to the extent that was comparable with previous reports which used a similar RT-race-IAT structure [ 59 – 63 ]. In our model, the direct comparison between the accuracy and reaction times (measured in the overall task and critical blocks) collected in the RT- vs the MT-race-IAT task revealed a significantly higher accuracy and longer RTs in the MT-race-IAT (see Table 2 ).…”

“…Overall our sample obtained a mean RT-race-IAT D score of 1.08 (standard error of mean = 0.04; one-sample Student’s t-test (H0: μ = 0): t (115) = 26.43, p < .001; for details see S1 File ) indicating, on average, a pro-White implicit bias. It is worth noting that the D score collected in our sample is, on average, equivalent to that one reported in previous studies which used a similar RT-race-IAT structure [ 59 – 63 ].…”

Dynamics of parasympathetic activity in violent incarcerated offenders before, during, and in recovery from an emotional inhibition task

“…According to this theory, the magnitude of the decrease between the baseline and the active phase would correspond to the metabolic demand required by the task, and is expected to be small in, for example, the case of sustained attention 25 or simple reaction tasks 5 , and near full during a fight or flight response 26 , 27 . However, some increase in vagal control (increased HRV) from rest to task-related mobilization cannot be ruled out, especially in tasks requiring emotional resources 28 or empathic skills 29 , 30 .…”

Fecundidade, identificação racial e desigualdade

“…Neste contexto, estudos relataram uma ativação maior da matriz de dor cerebral quando os participantes observaram um ator de mesma raça recebendo algum estímulo prejudicial do que quando visualizaram um ator de outra raça(AZEVEDO et al, 2013;BERLINGERI et al, 2016). EmPalma et al (2019), os participantes da pesquisa precisavam de mais tempo para julgar uma experiência dolorosa sofrida por um ator negro do que um branco. .2.2.…”