Racial homogeneity in early childhood may affect brain
Kids who lived in orphanages have difficulty interpreting emotions on faces with foreign features
Seeing people of different races early in life may sculpt the developing brain, a new study suggests. Children who spent infancy in Chinese or Russian orphanages with little contact from outsiders had difficulty perceiving emotions on faces of people of unfamiliar races. These children also showed heightened brain responses to faces of unfamiliar races.
“This new study is unique in that it for the first time tells us that early exposure to faces of different races is important,” says psychologist Kang Lee of the University of Toronto. “The lack of such exposure can have long-lasting effects.”
Although the results, published in the Aug. 14 Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that race shapes the brain during infancy, the study can’t say what such a brain change might mean, says study coauthor Eva Telzer of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Our findings do not say anything about children’s behavior in their daily life.”
Telzer and her colleagues studied one of the few populations that could help reveal these effects: orphans who the researchers believe lived amid a single race of people early in life. Most of these 36 children spent time in Russian or Chinese orphanages and were later adopted by American families of European descent. On average, the kids were adopted when they were 2 to 3 years old and were between 6 and 16 years old at the time of the study.