Emotions and Prejudice Psychologists Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske (2006) examined the link between prejudice and negative emotions. They used fMRI to examine the brains of participants viewing images of people often stereotyped as incompetent, such as the elderly or disabled. Participants who viewed these images showed higher levels of activity in the prefrontal cortex, as indicated here by the orange spot circled in red. This is a pattern associated with the experience of pity.
Courtesy Susan Fiske