Asking white people to mirror the movements of a black person lowers their levels of implicit prejudice

New research shows that you can reduce racial prejudice simply by having a person mimic the movements of a member of the race he or she is prejudiced against. The method may work by activating brain mechanisms that contribute to feelings of empathy.

Normally, when we watch another person perform an action, our brain activity changes as we mentally simulate the other person. But the brain activity is less strong when we’re watching people from other racial groups, and is least strong among people who are prejudiced against the racial group.

Michael Inzlicht, professor in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) and affiliate faculty at the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto, wondered if he could turn that around. If prejudice reduces mental simulation, can physical simulation, or mimicry, reduce prejudice? It turns out that it can.

“We’ve shown that when people mimic others who belong to a different race than their own they tend to be less prejudiced toward that race,” Inzlicht says.

Inzlicht, along with Jennifer N. Gutsell and Lisa Legault, also of UTSC, divided 63 white students into three groups and had them watch a video of a person repeatedly reaching for a bottle and taking a drink of water. One group watched a video with a black actor, and group members were instructed to mimic his movements. For comparison, another group mimicked the movements of a white actor, and the third group simply watched a black actor. After the video, the group that had mimicked the black actor scored lower on a test of implicit prejudice against black people than either of the other two groups.

Previous research has shown that we experience “motor resonance” when we watch other people perform an action. For instance, in prior research, Inzlicht and Gutsell measured electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillations in the motor cortex that occurred while watching other people perform actions. The study showed that motor resonance was stronger in white people when they watched other white people, compared to watching blacks or South Asians.

Although the mechanism isn’t certain, it’s possible that physically mimicking someone activates the same brain mechanisms that are normally activated when someone watches a member of his or her own race, inspiring the missing feeling of empathy and reducing prejudice.

This study did not directly measure motor resonance. Instead, the researchers used a test that measured levels of implicit prejudice. During the test, an image of a black or white face is flashed on a screen for 75 milliseconds, followed by an image of an unfamiliar pictogram. Test-takers are asked whether they liked the pictogram or not. In fact, their answers really reveal their feelings about members of the other race.

Inzlicht thinks that the reduction in prejudice he saw in his study is likely only short-term, since it was based on mimicking movements for only 140 seconds. But he thinks mimicry over the longer term might make more permanent changes. He’s planning on studying athletes to see if he can find any changes caused by coordinating movements with teammates of a different race.

New study by Tufts University scientists shows that clinical judgments can be distorted by stereotypes.

Cultural, ethnic and gender stereotypes can significantly distort clinical judgments about “facially masked” patients with Parkinson’s disease, according to a newly published study from researchers at Tufts University, Brandeis University and the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan.

This can lead to inappropriate and inequitable health care for those suffering from Parkinson’s, a common nervous system disorder, particularly in the elderly, with some 50,000 new cases reported in the U.S. each year.

“Practitioners need to better understand the complexities of this disease, and ensure that their own personal cultural biases do not impact their treatment of patients,” said lead author Linda Tickle-Degnen, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Occupational Therapy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts.

In research published in the July issue of the journal of Social Science & Medicine, 284 American and Taiwanese healthcare practitioners were evaluated on their responses to videotaped interviews of 24 American and Taiwanese women and men with Parkinson’s disease.

The patients had varying degrees of “facial masking,” a condition in which the face loses the ability to change expression, creating an appearance of apathy or social disengagement. Practitioners judged the patients on four psychological attributes: sociability, cognitive competence, depression and social supportiveness.

“We know from previous research that facial masking is stigmatizing, but those findings were limited by being conducted in western cultures with mostly whites. Very little investigation has been done on the effect of socio-cultural assumptions and the impact on health care,” said Tickle-Degnen.

“Our research found that despite their neurological expertise, practitioners had negatively biased impressions of people with higher masking and those biases were notably more pronounced when facial masking clashed with cultural, ethnic and gender expectations,” Tickle-Degnen continued. “Health care professionals need to let go of their reliance on the unresponsive face and pay greater attention to what patients and family members tell them as well as to other cues.”

 Assumptions differ for Asians and Westerners

The researchers chose to study Taiwanese and American cultures because of their markedly differing views of the social self in the world. East Asians are expected to strive more for intellectual achievement, and to be less extroverted and less expressive, while Americans are expected to be more outgoing and socially expressive.

While practitioners in both countries judged patients with higher masking to be more depressed and less sociable overall, the same health symptom yielded varying health care judgments depending on the ethnicity and gender of the patients.

Practitioners were more biased by facial masking when judging the sociability of the American patients. Similarly, American practitioners’ judgments of patient sociability were more negatively biased in response to masking than were those of Taiwanese practitioners.

In contrast, practitioners were more biased by masking when judging the cognitive competence and social supportiveness of the Taiwanese patients. Taiwanese practitioners’ judgments of patient cognitive competence were more negatively biased in response to masking than were those of American practitioners.

Gender stereotypes also played a role in the practitioners’ judgments. The stigmatizing effect of facial masking was more pronounced in response to women, particularly Americans, than to men in both countries.

Source Article: Tickle-Degnen, L., Zebrowitz, L.A., Ma, H.-. Culture, Gender and Health Care Stigma: Practitioners’ Response to Facial Masking Experienced by People with Parkinson’s Disease, Social Science & Medicine (2011), doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.05.008

New study shows certain setttings and racial-ethnic parity strengthen beneficial effect

Education, referrals, support and other interventions by community health workers improve rates of screening mammography in the United States – especially in medical and urban settings and among women whose race and ethnicity is similar to that of the community health workers serving them.

Researchers at the University of South Florida, Moffitt Cancer Center, and Georgia Southern University reported these findings earlier this month in an online first issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Their systematic review and analysis of a wide range of original studies evaluating community health worker programs offers a clearer, more powerful picture of the effectiveness of CHWs than the single studies alone – some which found no improvement in mammography screening.

Community health workers (CHW) are lay people trained to serve as a bridge between people in their communities and health care providers and services. CHWs have traditionally served people who lack access to adequate health care and are at highest risk for poor outcomes. These liaisons have often been used to promote screenings for breast cancer, a disease with significant racial and socioeconomic disparities in mortality, survival rates and cancer stage at diagnosis.

“Our systematic study points to the fact that community health workers play an important role in helping medically underserved women obtain screening mammograms,” said lead author Kristen Wells, PhD, MPH, assistant professor at the USF Center for Evidence-Based Medicine and Health Outcomes Research. “Future studies need to focus on what factors really drive the success of the interventions. What makes a strong community health worker program that best helps the most people?”

The researchers systematically reviewed 24 studies (randomized controlled trials, case-controlled studies and quasi-experimental studies) investigating the effectiveness of CHW programs specifically designed to increase screening mammography in women age 40 or older without a history of breast cancer. These programs were conducted in the United States in community health clinics or other settings outside a hospital. Eighteen studies enrolled a total of 26,660 participants and provided enough data to do further analysis.

Overall, the analysis found that interventions by CHWs are associated with a significant increase in rates of screening mammography. The study also teased out from the randomized controlled trials some new findings about when and where CHW programs are most likely to benefit:

• Studies that reported matching CHWs and patient populations by race and ethnicity showed stronger improvement in adhering to mammography guidelines than those that did not.
• Recruiting participants from a medical setting, like a community clinic, was more effective than recruiting them from churches, neighborhoods or other community settings. “A link to a medical setting is critical when designing a community health worker program to promote mammography screening,” Wells said.
• CHW interventions offered in urban settings were associated with increases in screening mammography, while those provided in rural locales were not. “This difference may reflect accessibility issues and transportation barriers,” Wells said. “In some rural communities, mammograms are more difficult to obtain.”
• CHW programs that reported delivering three or more types of interventions — including health education, referrals, appointment scheduling, vouchers, free or low-cost mammograms, emotional or social support, appointment reminders – were associated with stronger increases in screening mammography than programs providing two or less types.

A new study indicates high rates of injection drug use in urban Canadian Aboriginal youth, particularly in women, and points to the need for culturally specific prevention programs, states an article in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Aboriginal leadership is alarmed at the levels of substance abuse in their young people, especially injection drug use, which is associated with HIV and hepatitis C virus infections. Injection drug use accounts for 70% of all hepatitis C virus and almost 60% of HIV infections in Aboriginal youth under age 24 in Canada. The history of colonization, including the effect of residential schooling on several generations and the child welfare system, has had significant negative effects on Aboriginal communities. Many children and youth have experienced physical, sexual and emotional abuses as well as exposure to familial violence and drug dependence.

The Cedar Project is a prospective study of 605 Aboriginal youth in Vancouver and Prince George, British Columbia, conducted from 2003 to 2007 that sought to understand use of illicit drugs, particularly relating to infection with HIV. Participants were between the ages of 14 and 30 years and had smoked or injected illicit drugs, other than marijuana, in the month before enrolment. The median age was 23, and 292 (48.3%) were women.

At the start of the study, 335 (55.4%) of participants reported a history of injection drug use. Injection drug users were more likely to be women, to be older, to identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or two-spirited, to have experienced sexual abuse, to have a parent who attended a residential school and to have other risk factors. In participants who had no history of injection drug use and who attended at least one follow-up visit (197 out of 270), 39 people (18 men, 21 women) began to inject drugs.

Young Aboriginal women were twice as likely to inject drugs as men.

“In our study population, about 11 participants per 100 person-years will transition to injection drug use — a rate that is almost twice as high as that found in the only other available longitudinal study done in Canada investigating transition to injection drug use among young people (6.8 per 100 person-years in Montréal, Quebec),” states Dr. Patricia Spittal, School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia, with coauthors. “Transition to injection drug use at a young age not only increases the risk of contracting an infectious disease, it also further entrenches the young person in an increasingly dangerous street life that often involves sex work, violence, predation and life-long addiction.”

The study was conducted by researchers from the School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia; Simon Fraser University; the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences at Providence Health Care; the Wuikinuxv Nation, Port Hardy, BC; and the Splats’in/Secwepemc Nation, Enderby, BC.

“This study documents an unacceptable number of young, at-risk Aboriginal people transitioning to injection drug use every year; however, there are no prevention programs tailored specifically to this population,” states Chief Wayne Christian and coauthors. “Support for community-based programs that address the potential for drug dependence within the context of sexual trauma should be prioritized to respond to the dual epidemics of injection drug use and blood-borne infection among Aboriginal people,” they conclude.

Why Increasing Poverty and Low Income Threatens Canadians’ Health and Health Care System by Dennis Raphael, School of Health Policy and Management, York University. Article in the Canadian Review of Social Policy, Fall 2009, Winter 2010.

Concerns about increasing numbers of Canadians living in poverty and on low incomes have primarily been raised by the social development and social welfare sectors. The health-related consequences of these increases are profound yet the public health and health care communities have been strangely silent concerning these issues. This is surprising as accumulating evidence indicates that poverty and low income have significant effects upon the health of populations.

• Research shows the profound effects upon the health of individuals and populations of how income is distributed within a society
• The increases in incidence of poverty associated with increasing income inequality is negatively related to a wide number of indicators of health in North American states/provinces and cities
• A second hypothesis is that even individuals not living in poverty or on low incomes in unequal communities experience stress associated with comparisons of their life situations with that of others
• The third hypothesis is that unequal jurisdictions are also the ones that—in addition to having greater numbers of poor and low-income people—spend less on, and therefore have weaker social infrastructures and social safety nets.

Read the full report.

By Steven Tufts, Ann Marie Murnaghan, Philip Kelly, Maryse Lemoine. Toronto Immigration Employment Data Initiative (TIEDI), April 2011.

Across Canada, labour markets are becoming increasingly casualized with temporary, part-time work becoming the new “non-standard” to replace the standard employment relationship. Labour markets are, moreover, segmented based on the assumed differences among workers, derived from place of birth, gender, ethnicity, and race – a phenomenon known as exclusionary discrimination.

Key Points:

• Canadian-born and immigrant women in the Toronto labour market earn less than men when working full-time. They are also more likely to work part-time
• Immigrant women and men earn less on average than Canadian-born women and men earn in full-time jobs
• Immigrants are more likely to hold full-time employment than those born in Canada
• Recent immigrants are less likely to work full-time than established immigrants
• The Toronto labour market is segmented by occupational classifications. Immigrants who work in low paying occupations are characterized by precarious work, but often would full-time in these occupations
• Those who were educated abroad and work full-time earn less than those who were educated in Canada, regardless of gender.

Full TIEDI report

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – People, especially men, who feel any kind of discrimination, are likely to see their waistlines expand, according to research from Purdue University.

“This study found that males who persistently experienced high levels of discrimination during a nine-year period were more likely to see their waist circumference increase by an inch compared to those who did not report discrimination,” said Haslyn E.R. Hunte, an assistant professor of health and kinesiology. “Females who reported similar experiences also saw their waistlines grow by more than half an inch. This shows how discrimination hurts people physically, and it’s a reminder how people’s unfair treatment of others can be very powerful.

“People who feel unfairly treated should be aware of this connection between the stress related to their perception and consider coping strategies like exercise or other healthy behaviors as a coping mechanism for such stress. More importantly, as a society we must become more aware of how we treat people and that treating others unfairly matters beyond hurt feelings.”

These findings are published online in the American Journal of Epidemiology. The study, based on a predominantly white sample of more than 1,400 people, compared health and aging data from the 1995 and 2004 National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States. Hunte found that people who reported recurring discrimination tended to have a higher increase in waist circumference over time. Men reported an average of 2.39 centimeters increase in waist circumference compared to those who reported low levels of discrimination, and women reported an average increase of 1.88 centimeters over others during the nine-year period.

“While this study shows there is a difference between men and women, it doesn’t provide specific reasons for that difference,” Hunte said. “More research will need to be done to understand how and why men and women cope differently with this stress or if there are differences in how their bodies react.”

Hunte focused on waist circumference – instead of the body mass index formula, which measures obesity based on height and weight – because abdominal fat is a better indicator of poor cardiovascular-related health outcomes than body mass index.

“Being fat is not healthy, but there are greater problems with individuals who are more pear shaped, meaning that fat builds up in their waist region, rather than someone whose fat is deposited throughout the body,” Hunte said. “There is some indication that stressors, such as interpersonal discrimination, can concentrate fat around the midsection. We’re not sure why, and more work needs to be done to understand this connection between behavior and physiology. How does what’s above the skin affect what is taking place under the skin?”

People who reported ongoing perceptions of discrimination said they were treated with less courtesy than others, received poorer customer service or people acted as if they were afraid of them. The source of discrimination is not known, but Hunte did exempt individuals who reported that they felt discrimination due to their weight.

Hunte is planning to investigate this further by studying biomarkers, such as cortisol, which is a stress-induced hormone, in relationship to effects of discrimination.

People with new ideas to address major problems who are relentless in the pursuit of their visions, people who simply will not take “no” for an answer, who will not give up until they have spread their ideas as far as they possibly can.” Bornstein, 2007

The Objective of SEMH
The Social Entrepreneurism in Mental Health (SEMH) research group focuses on attempting to better understand how mental health equity can be achieved through the application of social entrepreneurial principles in mental health care. Our goal is to learn from the people who have transformed innovative ideas into highly effective services—to articulate the models upon which their services are based and the implications of their work for policy development—to share new ways to more effectively address the pervasive health disparities that exist in our society.

What is social entrepreneurism in mental health?
Key Attributes of Social Entrepreneurship in Mental Health Equity:

1. Highly innovative – addressing mental health (broadly defined) in ways that represented new approaches to care.
2. Sustainable – the innovative approach has been both successfully implemented and has also demonstrated sustainability fiscally and otherwise.
3. Reach and transferability – the approach has successfully and meaningfully engaged the communities served and represents a model that could be implemented in other jurisdictions and at other times.
4. Effective and Resourceful – the individuals involved readily take advantage of opportunities to expand their work and demonstrate a strong capacity to persevere despite few resources and other forms of adversity.

Who we are
SEMH was developed by Drs. Sean Kidd and Kwame McKenzie. Both are research staff at the Toronto Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and faculty with the University of Toronto Department of Psychiatry.

The Project that Launched SEMH
SEMH was grew from a research project funded by the University of Ottawa Population Health Improvement Research Network. In this project we assembled and led a committee composed of recognized leaders in service provision among Aboriginal, LGBTQ, immigrant, refugee, and homeless persons to determine the programs and organizations in Toronto that have broken new ground in conceptualizing and developing mental health services in each of these sectors. Working with this committee, we engaged in an intensive search process to identify exemplary organizations and chose five such organizations to participate in an in-depth analysis of their work. Case studies were then completed with each of these organizations to identify factors that have been critical to their success.

This project culminated in the Knowledge Transfer event held at the Toronto MaRS Discovery District on March 3, 2011 entitled Learning from the Groundbreakers: Models of Innovation in Addressing Mental Health Equity in Toronto (PDF only).

Why, and when, do we learn to speak the way that we do? Research from North Carolina State University on African-American children presents an unexpected finding: language use can go on a roller-coaster ride during childhood as kids adopt and abandon vernacular language patterns.

“We found that there is a ‘roller-coaster effect,’ featuring an ebb and flow in a child’s use of vernacular English over the course of his or her language development,” says Dr. Walt Wolfram, William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor of English Linguistics at NC State and co-author of several recent papers describing the research. “This was totally unanticipated.” Vernacular English is defined here as culturally specific speech patterns that are distinct from standard English; in this case, the vernacular is African-American English (AAE).

One implication of the finding involves education, since teachers often advocate teaching standard English early in a childhood education. “This approach does seem to work at first,” Wolfram says, “but it doesn’t last.” In other words, if a school system wants its students to graduate high school with a strong foundation in standard English, it may have to revisit standard English later in the education curriculum.

Specifically, the researchers found that children come to school speaking English with a relatively high number of vernacular features. Then, through the first four grades of elementary school, those features are reduced, as children adopt more standard English language patterns. As the children move toward middle school, the level of vernacular rises – though many children often reduce their use of vernacular again as they enter high school.

“This finding reveals a cyclic pattern in the use of African-American vernacular English that no one expected to see during children’s language development,” says Janneke Van Hofwegen, a research associate at NC State and co-author of the study. “This wasn’t even a hypothesis when we began the study.”

The researchers note that, while their data looked solely at African-American children, the findings may be applicable more broadly to other groups.

The research stems from the longest, and largest, study ever to examine the longitudinal development of language in African-American children. The study began in 1990, following 88 African-American children from central North Carolina in order to track their language development. The study is ongoing, with 68 of the original participants still being tracked. The data is collected by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute in Chapel Hill, N. C.

The retention rate of the participants is remarkably high, particularly given that approximately 71 percent of the children were living below the poverty line in 1990. “It’s incredible, and gives us a rare opportunity to study language development in children,” Wolfram says.

The study also gives researchers an impressive array of data, providing them with access to school and test data, as well as the data collected through the study’s own interviews and surveys.

Researchers are currently assessing how and whether dialect use is related to literacy skills, as well as the role that mothers play in their children’s use of vernacular.

One of the papers, “Trajectories of Development in AAE: The First 17 Years,” is forthcoming from the Proceedings of the Conference on African American Language In Popular Culture. The paper was co-authored by Wolfram; Van Hofwegen; Mary E. Kohn, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Dr. Jennifer Renn, who worked on the paper while a Ph.D. student at UNC-Chapel Hill. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Another paper, “Coming of age in African American English: A longitudinal study,” was co-authored by Wolfram and Van Hofwegen and was published in September 2010 in the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

NC State’s Department of English is part of the university’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

On March 8, 2011 Dr. David Hulchanski, the research director for the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto, will present “The Three Cities within Toronto: Income Polarization among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970-2005“. Dr. Hulchanski is the principal investigator of the Neighbourhood Change Community University Research Alliance (CURA), and a professor of community development in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto.

In this webinar Dr. Hulchanski will discuss the findings of the report and its implications. If current trends continue, the City of Toronto will eventually be sharply divided into a city of wealthy neighbourhoods and poor neighbourhoods with few middle-income neighbourhoods. A copy of the report, The Three Cities within Toronto, is available at: www.neighbourhoodchange.ca

Register now

From the report findings:

• Toronto’s neighbourhoods fall into three clear groups based on income change, 1970-2005
• The middle-income areas of the city shrank dramatically between 1970 and 2005, while the high-income area increased slightly, and the low-income areas increased substantially
• Poverty has moved from the centre to the edges of the city
• These are long term trends
• The segregation of the city by income is not inevitable or irreversible