Adolescents growing up amidst intractable conflict attenuate brain response to pain of outgroup
Open accessAbstract
Significance: Intergroup conflicts are among the world’s most imminent problems, particularly with the shift of battlefields into the heart of civilian locations and the participation of increasingly younger adolescents in intergroup conflict. We found that Israeli and Palestinian adolescents reared in a climate of long-standing strife shut down the brain’s automatic response to outgroup pain. This neural modulation characterized a top-down process superimposed upon an automatic response to the pain of all and was sensitive to hostile behavior toward outgroup, uncompromising worldviews, and brain-to-brain synchrony among group members. Findings pinpoint adolescents’ sociocognitive top-down processes as targets for intervention.
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When people process culturally relevant material, such as stories about protected collectivist values, neural response differences appear between cultures and may track how strongly individuals identify with their culture.
“Group-level differences in neural responses between cultures have also been observed during processing of culturally relevant stimuli, such as stories describing protected collectivist values, that may be related to the degree of identification with the culture120,121.”
From The default mode network: where the idiosyncratic self meets the shared social world (2021) · cites this paper as [121]
Higher levels of oxytocin in saliva, blood, or urine relate to intergroup discrimination.
“and intergroup discrimination (Levy et al., 2016).”
From Oxytocin promotes coordinated out-group attack during intergroup conflict in humans (2019) · cites this paper as Levy et al., 2016
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- Authors
- Levy, J., Goldstein, A., Influs, M., Masalha, S., Zagoory-Sharon, O., & Feldman, R.
- Affiliations
- Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan 5290002, Israel;
- Bar-Ilan University (IL)
- College of Academic Studies, Or-Yehuda 60218, Israel;
- Corresponding author
- Feldman, Ruth
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2016-11-14
- Volume
- 113
- Issue
- 48
- Pages
- 13696-13701
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC5137744
- OpenAlex
- W2554119654
- Cited by
- 108
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 30 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 20.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Fetzer foundation (011)
- German-Israel Foundation (1114-101.4/2010)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion
- Keywords
- intergroup conflict, adolescents, in-group favoritism, pain perception, somatosensory cortex, oxytocin, brain-to-brain synchrony, top-down control, magnetoencephalography
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Attitude, Brain, Brain Mapping, Empathy, Female, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Israel, Jews, Male, Middle East, Minority Groups, Oxytocin, Politics, Somatosensory Cortex, Magnetoencephalography, Arabs
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