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.