People interact with other people every day and their behavior changes when they communicate with people from different backgrounds. What are the factors behind these behaviors? How a person’s background contributes to different behaviors?
Psychologists and biologists have been researching the responses that our brain gives on different occasions and when we interact with different people.
According to research, it is found that a structure (habenula) in the front brain is involved in controlling our social behaviors and the way we speak. It is the front part of our brain that controls our responses when we interact with different people. It restrains us from behaving rudely and speaking bad words. It helps us regulate our social behaviors.
The branch under which social behaviors are studied is called social neuroscience. It is defined as the study of neural basis and mechanism of social behavior.
According to an experiment published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 39 pairs were selected to communicate with each other and their brain activity was monitored. They were given a specific topic to talk about and were supposed to talk for 12 minutes on that topic.
The experiment showed that people belonging to the same social and economic background had lower activity in their frontal brain and people belonging to different backgrounds had higher activity in their frontal brain section.
In situations where both participants have different backgrounds, researchers observed increased activity in their brains. It didn’t matter which one of them belonged to a higher socioeconomic class because their brains were equally stressed.
The participants with different backgrounds suffered anxiety during the conversation as compared to the participants with the same backgrounds.
Since the speech, cognition, and language are controlled by the sub-frontal section of the brain called the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex, it is clear from the experiment that the social and economic background of people contributes to the function of the brain.
The participants were asked about their ages, economy, social status, and education level, etc. When the results were compiled, it became evident that the age, race, social status, economic condition, and education levels were the main drivers of the frontal brain and these levels also affect the level of anxiety in the participants.
