Ethnic effects when facing children: An ERP study

Abstract

Abundant research has highlighted a disadvantage experienced by children of ethnic minority groups in, for example, educational and health care settings. In order to understand implicit attitudes that contribute to ethnic disparities, underlying neural correlates have been widely studied. However, this has been limited to the context of adults. Using a sample of nulliparous Caucasian females (N = 46), the current study is the first to examine how early attentional and facial perceptual processing stages, assessed with event-related brain potentials (ERPs), differentiate for stimuli of young ingroup (of the same ethnicity) or outgroup (of a different ethnicity) children. Additionally, we assessed how a differentiation in ERPs may relate to subsequent adult responsiveness to children by measuring both cuteness ratings and motivation to view child faces. Similar to previous findings for adult facial stimuli, we found significant differences in attentional (N200) and facial perceptual (N170) processing when adults were faced with children of different ethnicities. Furthermore, increased differentiation in attentional processing (N200) for ingroup and outgroup children was associated with reduced cuteness ratings of outgroup children. Importantly however, participants showed no overall preference for ingroup child faces, as motivation to view child faces was even greater towards outgroup child faces. In addition, increased self-reported motivation for parental care was related to enhanced cuteness appraisals of outgroup child faces. Taken together, these findings reveal how early social categorization processes may lead to biased behavior when interacting with children of ethnic minorities.