Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2006 Jun;1(1):26-36.
doi: 10.1093/scan/nsl002.

Alternative mechanisms for regulating racial responses according to internal vs external cues

David M Amodio  1 , Jennifer T Kubota, Eddie Harmon-Jones, Patricia G Devine
Affiliations

Alternative mechanisms for regulating racial responses according to internal vs external cues

David M Amodio et al. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2006 Jun.

Abstract

Personal (internal) and normative (external) impetuses for regulating racially biased behaviour are well-documented, yet the extent to which internally and externally driven regulatory processes arise from the same mechanism is unknown. Whereas the regulation of race bias according to internal cues has been associated with conflict-monitoring processes and activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), we proposed that responses regulated according to external cues to respond without prejudice involves mechanisms of error-perception, a process associated with rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) activity. We recruited low-prejudice participants who reported high or low sensitivity to non-prejudiced norms, and participants completed a stereotype inhibition task in private or public while electroencephalography was recorded. Analysis of event-related potentials revealed that the error-related negativity component, linked to dACC activity, predicted behavioural control of bias across conditions, whereas the error-perception component, linked to rACC activity, predicted control only in public among participants sensitive to external pressures to respond without prejudice.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Illustration of the ERN and Pe components elicited by errors on a behavioural task.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Schematic of weapons identification task, adapted from Payne (2001), illustrating the timecourse of events (A) and example trial stimuli (B).
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Reaction times for correct responses (A) and error rates (B) on the weapons identification task as a function of trial type.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Error-related negativity (ERN) and error-positivity (Pe) waveforms associated with each trial type of the weapons identification task. Zero represents the time of response.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Predicted values for response accuracy on trials requiring stereotype inhibition (black-tool trials), illustrating the interaction of error-positivity (Pe) amplitude and sensitivity to normative pressure in Private vs. Public response conditions, computed at one standard deviation below and above each mean.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Allport GW. The Nature of Prejudice. MA: Addison-Wesley; 1954. Reading.
    1. Amodio DM., Frith CD. Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2006;7:268–77. - PubMed
    1. Amodio DM, Harmon-Jones E, Devine PG. Individual differences in the activation and control of affective race bias as assessed by startle eyeblink responses and self-report. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2003;84:738–53. - PubMed
    1. Amodio DM, Harmon-Jones E, Devine PG, Curtin JJ, Hartley SL, Covert AE. Neural signals for the detection of unintentional race bias. Psychological Science. 2004;15:88–93. - PubMed
    1. Aston-Jones G, Cohen JD. An integrative theory of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine function: adaptive gain and optimal performance. Annual Review of Neuroscience. 2005;28:403–50. - PubMed