Are aggressive people able to integrate mitigating information into
their hostile intent attribution? An ERP study.
Abstract
Current data on the nature of aggressive individuals’ difficulties in
reappraising their spontaneous hostile intent attribution are
contradictory: they are impulsive and don’t seek out for additional
nonhostile cues vs. they pay attention to nonhostile cues but fail to
integrate them into their hostile schemas. To better understand the
nature of aggressive people’s reappraisal difficulties, we developed an
event-related brain potential (ERP) protocol inspired by Zaki’s (2013)
cue integration model. The objective of this study was to track the
neural activity associated with the violation of expectations about
hostile vs. nonhostile intentions in aggressive and nonaggressive
individuals when facing conflicting contextual and behavioral cues in a
given social situation. We hypothesized that aggressive individuals do
not integrate nonhostile contextual information and, therefore,
overestimate the behavioral hostile cues. Our sample consisted of women
from the community (n=23) and a prison (n=20). Taken together, the
results suggest that aggressive individuals demonstrate an impulsivity
in their decision-making about other people’s intentions. This would be
the case, not because they fail to seek out mitigating information, but
rather because they fail to complete the inferential processes about the
hostile and nonhostile information before making a judgement about the
other’s intent. In contrast with aggressive individuals, non-aggressive
people would be able to make a decision when facing conflicting
information about the other’s mental state by privileging contextual
cues in order to attenuate their attribution of hostile intention based
on the behavior of others.