Skin color affects ability to empathize with pain - CNN.com: Humans are hardwired to feel another person's pain. But they may feel less innate empathy if the other person's skin color doesn't match their own, a new study suggests.When people say 'I feel your pain,' they usually just mean that they understand what you're going through. But neuroscientists have discovered that we literally feel each other's pain (sort of).
If you see -- or even just think of -- a person who gets whacked in the foot, for instance, your nervous system responds as if you yourself had been hit in the same spot, even though you don't perceive the pain physically.
Researchers in Italy are reporting that subtle racial bias can interfere with this process -- a finding with important implications for health care as well as social harmony.
'Pain empathy is basically feeling someone else's pain,' says Carmen Green, M.D., a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the research. 'This paper tells us that race plays a role in pain empathy.'
