Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Availability
Open Access Thesis
Keywords
Amygdaloid body; Ethnopsychology; Face perception; Threat (Psychology); Academic theses;
Abstract
DNA exonerations in the legal system have increased steadily since 1989 from one or two per year to an average of 21 per year since 2001. A disquieting number of these exonerations originated from wrongful convictions following cross-racial identifications. Explaining the prevalence of erroneous cross-racial identifications centers on the Cross Race Effect (CRE), a phenomena whereby recognition for one's own race greatly outweighs recognition ability for other-race faces. Forty years of research in this area has produced a number of competing explanations. Recent neurological evidence has demonstrated separate neural regions for the processing of same-race and other-race faces as well as early detection and greater processing of social group information for other-race faces. MacLin and MacLin (2008) propose that a cognitive gating mechanism (CGM) detects the presence of other-race members by using racial markers such as hair and skin tone as indicators of other-raceness; detection of racial markers gates other-race faces for differential processing in the brain. Further research has implicated the amygdala in the processing of other-race faces for possible threat assessment. The current study used psychophysical methods to investigate whether adapting to threatening images alters the role of the amygdala causing shifts in racial categorization of accepted ingroup-outgroup members and whether other-race faces are assessed for threat. Following adaptation to threatening images, shifts in the perception of faces occurred causing a greater number of faces to be categorized as same-race as the role of the amygdala was reduced. Analogous shifts were found following adaptation to African-American faces indicating that African-American faces are assessed for threat.
Year of Submission
2009
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Department of Psychology
First Advisor
Otto H. MacLin
Second Advisor
Kim MacLin
Third Advisor
Andre Gilpin
Date Original
2009
Object Description
1 PDF file (84 leaves)
Copyright
©2009 Osman Afzal Chowdhry
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Chowdhry, Osman Afzal, "Further Delineation of the Role of the Amygdala in Face Processing and Racial Categorization" (2009). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 2341.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/2341
Comments
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