Dataset Information

Who Differentiates by Skin Color? Status Attributions and Skin Pigmentation in Chile.

ABSTRACT: A growing body of research has shown that phenotypes and skin pigmentation play a fundamental role in stratification dynamics in Latin American countries. However, the relevance of skin color on status attribution for different status groups has been little studied in the region. This article seeks to broaden the research on phenotypic status cues using Chile as a context for analysis - a Latin American country with a narrow although continuous spectrum of skin tones, marked status differences, and a mostly white elite. We draw on status construction theory to hypothesize that skin pigmentation in Chile has become a status cue, although its heuristic relevance could differ across status groups. Using visual stimuli and a repeated measure design, we studied this relationship and tested whether the use of skin pigmentation as a status cue is conditional upon the status of those categorizing others. The results reveal that participants attribute, on average, lower status to others of darker skin. Besides, skin pigmentation has a conditional effect on the social status of participants: whereas skin pigmentation does not work as a status cue for lower status participants, it is an important status marker for the categorizations that middle and especially higher status participants perform. The phenotypic composition of reference groups of low- and high-status individuals and system justification are discussed as potential explanations for these results.

SUBMITTER: Torres F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6618139 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Who Differentiates by Skin Color? Status Attributions and Skin Pigmentation in Chile.

Torres Fernanda F Salgado Mauricio M Mackenna Bernardo B Núñez Javier J

Frontiers in psychology 20190703

A growing body of research has shown that phenotypes and skin pigmentation play a fundamental role in stratification dynamics in Latin American countries. However, the relevance of skin color on status attribution for different status groups has been little studied in the region. This article seeks to broaden the research on phenotypic status cues using Chile as a context for analysis - a Latin American country with a narrow although continuous spectrum of skin tones, marked status differences, ...[more]

PMID: 31333544

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Project description:A current concern in genetic epidemiology studies in admixed populations is that population stratification can lead to spurious results. The Brazilian census classifies individuals according to self-reported "color", but several studies have demonstrated that stratifying according to "color" is not a useful strategy to control for population structure, due to the dissociation between self-reported "color" and genomic ancestry. We report the results of a study in a group of Brazilian siblings in which we measured skin pigmentation using a reflectometer, and estimated genomic ancestry using 21 Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs). Self-reported "color", according to the Brazilian census, was also available for each participant. This made it possible to evaluate the relationship between self-reported "color" and skin pigmentation, self-reported "color" and genomic ancestry, and skin pigmentation and genomic ancestry. We observed that, although there were significant differences between the three "color" groups in genomic ancestry and skin pigmentation, there was considerable dispersion within each group and substantial overlap between groups. We also saw that there was no good agreement between the "color" categories reported by each member of the sibling pair: 30 out of 86 sibling pairs reported different "color", and in some cases, the sibling reporting the darker "color" category had lighter skin pigmentation. Socioeconomic status was significantly associated with self-reported "color" and genomic ancestry in this sample. This and other studies show that subjective classifications based on self-reported "color", such as the one that is used in the Brazilian census, are inadequate to describe the population structure present in recently admixed populations. Finally, we observed that one of the AIMs included in the panel (rs1426654), which is located in the known pigmentation gene SLC24A5, was strongly associated with skin pigmentation in this sample.

Project description:Nutritional and medicinal benefits have been attributed to the consumption of tissues from the black-boned chickens in oriental countries. Lueyang black-boned chicken is one of the native chicken breeds. However, some birds may instead have white or lighter skin, which directly causes economic losses every year. Previous studies of pigmentation have focused on a number of genes that may play important roles in coat color regulation. Illumina2000 sequencing technology was used to catalog the global gene expression profiles in the skin of the Lueyang chicken with white versus black skin. A total of 18,608 unigenes were assembled from the reads obtained from the skin of the white and black chickens. A total of 649 known genes were differentially expressed in the black versus white chickens, with 314 genes that were up regulated and 335 genes that were down-regulated, and a total of 162 novel genes were differentially expressed in the black versus white chickens, consisting of 73 genes that were up-regulated (including 4 highly expressed genes that were expressed exclusively in the skin of the black chickens) and 89 genes that were down-regulated. There were also a total of 8 known coat-color genes expressed in previous studies (ASIP, TYR, KIT, TYRP1, OCA2, KITLG, MITF and MC1R). In this study, 4 of which showed greater expression in the black chickens, and several were up-regulated, such as KIT, ASIP, TYR and OCA2. To our surprise, KITLG, MITF and MC1R showed no significant difference in expression between the black- and white-skinned chickens, and the expression of TYRP1 was not detected in either skin color. The expression of ASIP, TYR, KIT, TYRP1, OCA2, KITLG, MITF and MC1R was validated by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), and the results of the qPCR were consistent with the RNA-seq. This study provides several candidate genes that may be associated with the development of black versus white skin. More importantly, the fact that the MC1R gene showed no significant difference in expression between the black and white chickens is of particular interest for future studies that aim to elucidate its functional role in the regulation of skin color.

Dataset Information

Who Differentiates by Skin Color? Status Attributions and Skin Pigmentation in Chile.

Publications

Who Differentiates by Skin Color? Status Attributions and Skin Pigmentation in Chile.

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