ИСТИНА

Traditional questionnaires and special tests for studying ethnic attitudes have certain drawbacks and limitations. One of them is due to the fact that respondent responses may reflect the desirable conscious preferences. To overcome this type of drawbacks it is necessary to develop new tests which combine technologies for presenting realistic scenes of interethnic interaction with technologies for recording involuntary behavioral and psychophysiological respondent reactions. We investigated ethnic attitudes arising while participants perceived avatar’s faces of own/other ethnic appearance with the help of psychophysiological techniques. We proposed that ethnic attitudes may be manifested in participant’s dynamic functional states which reflect the degree of “acceptance/rejection" of own/other race faces. We also proposed that changes in states would be accompanied by changes in psychophysiological reactions during face perception. A feature of the developed method was the combination of verbal assessments (the Bogardus questionnaire evaluating the social distance) with the psychophysiological reactions registered during face perception. The twenty two participants (10 M, 12 F, age 18-26, all positioned themselves as Russians) took part in our study. Four 3D models of avatar faces of Slovenian, Asian, Caucasian and Negroid appearance were created using the program "MakeHuman1.0.2". The avatar’s faces were presented using the HMD virtual reality system. The procedure started with a presentation of one of the three questions of the modified Bogardus scale, reflecting the degree of proximity of the social distance between the participant and the avatar. Then one of the four faces followed the question after which the participant had to answer the question. During the execution psychophysiological reactions (the brain rhythmic activities as well as the heart rate, the galvanic skin response (GSR) and the photoplethysmogram amplitudes) were registered. The analysis revealed significantly higher heart rate values (p <0.05), a greater deviation of the GSR amplitudes (p <0.01) and smaller ratio of alpha/beta brain waves (p <0.05) while perceiving faces of own-race group in comparison with faces of other-race group. Also it was shown that the differences in photoplethysmogram amplitudes were insignificant (p = 0.09). The results showed that the heart rate, the GSR amplitudes and the brain rhythmic activities can be considered as reliable indicators of the dynamic functional states "acceptance-rejection" of faces belonging to own- versus other-race groups.