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Neural Mechanisms of Attitude Change Toward Stigmatized Individuals: Temporoparietal Junction Activity Predicts Bias Reduction

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Abstract

Objectives

Psychological and neural evidence suggests that negative attitudes toward stigmatized individuals arise in part from failures to perceive them as social targets. Here, we tested whether experimentally upregulating neural regions involved in social cognition would predict subsequent decreases in bias toward stigmatized individuals (i.e., people who use substances).

Methods

Participants underwent fMRI while completing either a lovingkindness intervention task or a control task, and each task was reinforced via daily text messages for a month following the one-time fMRI scan. Changes in implicit bias against stigmatized individuals were measured by Implicit Association Tests.

Results

The lovingkindness intervention task, compared with a control task, elicited greater baseline activity in the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), implicated in mentalizing, or the process of making inferences about others’ mental states. The lovingkindness task compared with the control task also produced marginal decreases in bias over the month of the intervention. Individual differences in initial RTPJ activity at baseline during the fMRI intervention tasks further predicted improved implicit attitudes toward stigmatized individuals a month later.

Conclusions

The current study suggests that individual differences in people’s tendency to engage brain regions that support taking others’ perspectives are associated with greater changes in bias reduction over time. It is possible that strategies that upregulate mentalizing activity, such as lovingkindness training and other strategies that increase social cognitive processing, may be effective in shifting people’s biases against stigmatized individuals.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Nicole Cooper, Christin Scholz, Prateekshit Pandey, Alison Elliott, and Elizabeth Beard for research assistance, Matthew Brook O’Donnell for assistance in data analysis, Bruce Doré and Emile Bruneau for the helpful feedback, and the staff of the University of Pennsylvania fMRI Center for support and assistance.

Funding

This research was supported by the NIH New Innovator Award 1DP2DA03515601 (PI, E.B.F), NIH/National Cancer Institute Grant 1R01CA180015-01 (PI, E.B.F), and HopeLab (PIs, E.B.F, Y.K).

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YK designed the research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper. EBF designed the research, wrote the paper, and oversaw the project.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yoona Kang.

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The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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The study was approved by the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board.

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All participants provided informed consent.

Additional information

This study used a subset of a larger dataset from a study that examined an orthogonal question of health behavior change (reported in Kang et al. 2018). No prior report examined the implicit attitudes toward stigmatized individuals that are the focus of the current manuscript. We thank Nicole Cooper, Christin Scholz, Prateekshit Pandey, Alison Elliott, and Elizabeth Beard for research assistance, Matthew Brook O’Donnell for assistance in data analysis, Bruce Doré and Emile Bruneau for helpful feedback, and the staff of the University of Pennsylvania fMRI Center for support and assistance. This research was supported by NIH New Innovator Award 1DP2DA03515601 (PI, E.B.F), NIH/National Cancer Institute Grant 1R01CA180015-01 (PI, E.B.F) and HopeLab (PIs, E.B.F, Y.K).

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Kang, Y., Falk, E.B. Neural Mechanisms of Attitude Change Toward Stigmatized Individuals: Temporoparietal Junction Activity Predicts Bias Reduction. Mindfulness 11, 1378–1389 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01357-y

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