Abstract

The art of tattoo has been around for many years, the beginning unknown. While tattoos have been used for many purposes such as medicinal to cultural to aesthetics the perception of tattoos have changed alongside their uses. Humans tend to find those with tattoos as being less competent, trustworthy, and friendly compared to those without any tattoos. However, these biases tend to be implicit, unknown to the individual but still resulting in prejudice in the workplace. Employers tend to have stigma against tattooed individuals because of the stereotypes surrounding tattoos. Stigmatization has been shown to be related to the activation of a vast network of brain regions including the anterior cingulate cortex, lateral prefrontal cortex, insula, and amygdala. However, there has not been research done alongside event-related potentials and EEG regarding stigmatization of those with tattoos yet. The study purposes a study in which EEG is utilized by presenting to individuals a task where they rate the competency and warmth of individuals with and without tattoos in an academic setting. It is hypothesized that there will be higher peaks of the P300 ERP component when the participants are presented with a photo of an individual with tattoos rather than without. The P300 peaks are expected to be higher when shown more explicit tattoos than neutral.

Advisor

Herzmann, Grit

Department

Neuroscience

Keywords

tattoo, perception, bias

Publication Date

2024

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

Download

Share

COinS
 

© Copyright 2024 Alona Abufarha