Research On The Factors Affecting Reactive Aggression And The Related Neural Basis

Aggressive behavior is one of the most basic human behaviors, thus increasing attention has been paid to explore the influence of mediating factors on aggression. The General Aggression Model states that personal and situational factors influence aggressive behavior through the mediating effects of cognition, affect, and arousal. Gender is one of the most common personal factor and many studies have reported gender differences in aggression. Meanwhile, as a situational factor, perhaps interpersonal provocation is the most single and common cause of aggression. Interestingly, however, it was reported that the gender differences in aggression are attenuated when the aggressive behavior is elicited by provocation. Moreover, as the perpetrator is a decision-maker, the costs the aggressive behavior would take may have some impact on the perpetrator’s decision-making on whether or not to act aggressively. Little is known about how aggression and the related gender differences are modulated by its costs so far.The current study aimed to investigate the influence of the situational factors, i.e. provocation and costs, and the personal factor, i.e. gender, on the reactive aggression and the related neural basis. Experiment 1 used a variant of the Taylor Aggression Paradigm (TAP) and investigated the influence of provocation (lowly or highly) on the aggressive behavior as well as the gender difference. The second experiment examined influence of provocation, cost (cost or non-cost situation) and gender on reactive aggression. Using the same paradigm as Experiment 2, Experiment 3 adopted an event-related fMRI design to investigate the neural basis of reactive aggression modulated by provocation, cost and gender. The results are as follows:In Experimental 1, the results showed that, in the competitive reaction time task (in the TAP) against lowly or highly provocative opponents, trials against the latter elicited higher aggression in the subjects as reflected by selections of higher punishments for the provoking opponent. However, no gender differences were found.Combining the behavioral data from Experiment 2 and Experiment 3, the results revealed that, highly provocative opponents elicited higher aggression again and the differences of the selections of punishments for the lowly and highly provocative opponents are attenuated under the situation where subjects had to pay for acting aggressively. Turned to reaction times, the results showed that the male subjects acted much more slowly in the cost situation than in the non-cost situation only when competing against highly provocative opponents, while the female subjects acted this way only when competing against lowly provocative opponents.fMRI results in Experiment 3 revealed that, specific neural responses in areas related to cognitive control, negative affect and arousal processing provided additional information about the cognitive, emotional and arousal processes underlying reactive aggressive behavior.