Date of Award

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Casto, Kathleen

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

In an attempt to combat racism, bias reduction programs focus on aspects of various cognitive processes to reduce implicit racial bias with only moderate effectiveness. However, no research has looked at the connection between creativity and implicit racial bias, despite their strong and inverse conceptual linkage through underlying cognitive rigidity. The current study measured creativity with the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and implicit racial bias toward black individuals by using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to examine brain activity in frontal-parietal cortical areas associated with creative divergent thinking during the AUT and in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with implicit stereotypes during a black-versus-white friendliness rating task. Based on prior neuroimaging research linking higher cortical activity to increased energy expenditure, it is hypothesized that participants with relatively higher creativity scores as well as those with relatively lower bias scores will show greater hemodynamic activity in the frontal-parietal regions of interest during the respective creativity and bias tasks. Results showed that the AUT and IAT were negatively correlated, as hypothesized. The results did not support hypotheses regarding neural activity; i.e., there were no significant differences in task-associated patterns of hemodynamic activity between participants grouped as high and low creative or high and low bias. Implications for bias reduction programs and the aspects of cognition on which they should focus are discussed. Additionally, interesting hemodynamic trends that were observed are discussed, as are their implications for future fNIRS research aiming to explore the neurophysiological underpinnings of social cognition constructs.

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