Mad about you
Is She Angry? (Sexually Desirable) Women “See” Anger on Female Faces
Jaimie Arona Krems et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Intrasexual conflict may pose unique challenges for women. Whereas men’s aggression tends to be physical and direct, women’s tends to be relational and indirect, particularly when directed toward other women. Moreover, women’s expressions of anger are often suppressed, perhaps particularly when other women are the targets. Thus, women may face difficulty anticipating anger and anger-based aggression from other women. How might women manage this challenge? The functional projection of emotion may facilitate useful behavior; for instance, “seeing” anger on people believed to pose threats to physical safety may help perceivers preempt or avoid physical harm. Given the threats that women face, we predicted that (a) women are biased to “see” anger on neutral female (but not male) faces and that (b) women who are likely targets of intrasexual aggression (i.e., sexually desirable or available women) show an exaggerated bias. We report three studies that support these hypotheses and, more broadly, illustrate the value of a functional approach to social cognition.
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Individual differences in bitter taste preferences are associated with antisocial personality traits
Christina Sagioglou & Tobias Greitemeyer
Appetite, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two studies, we investigated how bitter taste preferences might be associated with antisocial personality traits. Two US American community samples (total N = 953; mean age = 35.65 years; 48% females) self-reported their taste preferences using two complementary preference measures and answered a number of personality questionnaires assessing Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, everyday sadism, trait aggression, and the Big Five factors of personality. The results of both studies confirmed the hypothesis that bitter taste preferences are positively associated with malevolent personality traits, with the most robust relation to everyday sadism and psychopathy. Regression analyses confirmed that this association holds when controlling for sweet, sour, and salty taste preferences and that bitter taste preferences are the overall strongest predictor compared to the other taste preferences. The data thereby provide novel insights into the relationship between personality and the ubiquitous behaviors of eating and drinking by consistently demonstrating a robust relation between increased enjoyment of bitter foods and heightened sadistic proclivities.
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Violent Rhetoric in Protracted Group Conflicts: Experimental Evidence from Israel and India
Joshua Gubler & Nathan Kalmoe
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do messages from political elites interact with individual traits of citizens to spur intergroup aggression? Building on research in social psychology, we expect that in places of protracted conflict, violent rhetoric from elites will be enough to mobilize antagonism toward an outgroup, especially among those who are generally less apt to be hostile toward the outgroup. We present results from two large survey experiments, the first conducted with young Jewish-Israeli adults across Israel and the second with a nationally diverse sample of adults in India. The results show that mild “fighting” words (e.g. “battle,” “fight”), combined with a reference to the outgroup, provoke significantly greater support for policies that harm the outgroup among some citizens. This effect is largest among individuals low in outgroup prejudice and low in aggressive personality traits, people who are usually less inclined to support policies that hurt the outgroup. Effects of violent rhetoric persist even with policies and rhetoric to help the outgroup. This work highlights the importance of considering both individual traits and contextual factors together to understand their full impact in the study of intergroup conflict.
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Reducing proactive aggression through non-invasive brain stimulation
Franziska Dambacher et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, October 2015, Pages 1303-1309
Abstract:
Aggressive behavior poses a threat to human collaboration and social safety. It is of utmost importance to identify the functional mechanisms underlying aggression and to develop potential interventions capable of reducing dysfunctional aggressive behavior already at a brain level. We here experimentally shifted fronto-cortical asymmetry to manipulate the underlying motivational emotional states in both male and female participants while assessing the behavioral effects on proactive and reactive aggression. Thirty-two healthy volunteers received either anodal transcranial direct current stimulation to increase neural activity within right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or sham stimulation. Aggressive behavior was measured with the Taylor Aggression Paradigm. We revealed a general gender effect, showing that men displayed more behavioral aggression than women. After the induction of right fronto-hemispheric dominance, proactive aggression was reduced in men. This study demonstrates that non-invasive brain stimulation can reduce aggression in men. This is a relevant and promising step to better understand how cortical brain states connect to impulsive actions and to examine the causal role of the prefrontal cortex in aggression. Ultimately, such findings could help to examine whether the brain can be a direct target for potential supportive interventions in clinical settings dealing with overly aggressive patients and/or violent offenders.
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Facial width-to-height ratio predicts psychopathic traits in males
Christine Anderl et al.
Personality and Individual Differences, January 2016, Pages 99–101
Abstract:
Facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR), a putative marker of pubertal testosterone action, has been reliably linked with various facets of unsociable behavior in men. In order to elucidate the underlying mechanisms, a recent study by Geniole and colleagues (2014) has provided evidence for an association between male fWHR and the psychopathic personality trait fearless dominance in an undergraduate student sample, although the reported effect size was small (βstand = .17). We aimed to replicate and extend this finding by recruiting young adult prison inmates in addition to a sample of undergraduate students, thereby increasing the variance of the psychopathy scores at the high-end of the continuum. We found significant positive associations between fWHR not only with fearless dominance, as reported before, but also with the factor self-centered impulsivity, and with overall psychopathy scores. Results point to a role of testosterone in the development of psychopathic personality traits.
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A Longitudinal Study of Resting Heart Rate and Violent Criminality in More Than 700 000 Men
Antti Latvala et al.
JAMA Psychiatry, October 2015, Pages 971-978
Objective: To study the predictive association of resting heart rate with violent and nonviolent criminality and with fatal and nonfatal injuries owing to assaults and unintentional injuries in the population.
Design, Setting, and Participants: We conducted a study of data from several Swedish national registers on 710 264 Swedish men in the general population born from 1958 to 1991, with a follow-up of up to 35.7 years. Outcome data were available and analyzed from January 1, 1973, through December 31, 2009. Resting heart rate was measured together with blood pressure at mandatory military conscription testing at a mean (SD) age of 18.2 (0.5) years.
Results: In models adjusted for physical, cardiovascular, psychiatric, cognitive, and socioeconomic covariates, compared with 139 511 men in the highest quintile of the distribution of resting heart rate (≥83 beats/min), 132 595 men with the lowest quintile (heart rate, ≤60 beats/min) had a 39% (95% CI, 35%-44%) higher hazard of being convicted of violent crimes and a 25% (95% CI, 23%-28%) higher hazard of being convicted of nonviolent crimes. The corresponding hazard was 39% higher for assault injuries (95% CI, 33%-46%) and for unintentional injuries (95% CI, 38%-41%). Further adjustment for cardiorespiratory fitness in a subset of 572 610 men with data from an exercise test did not reduce the associations. Similar associations were found between low systolic blood pressure and violent and nonviolent criminality and for assault injuries when systolic blood pressure was studied instead of resting heart rate in more than 1 million men.
Conclusions and Relevance: Among men, low resting heart rate in late adolescence was associated with an increased risk for violent criminality, nonviolent criminality, exposure to assault, and unintentional injury in adulthood. Most of these results were replicated with low systolic blood pressure. Resting heart rate and other autonomic measures merit further study in the development and prevention of violence and antisocial behavior.
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Tuong-Vi Nguyen et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, January 2016, Pages 109–118
Abstract:
Structural covariance, the examination of anatomic correlations between brain regions, has emerged recently as a valid and useful measure of developmental brain changes. Yet the exact biological processes leading to changes in covariance, and the relation between such covariance and behavior, remain largely unexplored. The steroid hormone testosterone represents a compelling mechanism through which this structural covariance may be developmentally regulated in humans. Although steroid hormone receptors can be found throughout the central nervous system, the amygdala represents a key target for testosterone-specific effects, given its high density of androgen receptors. In addition, testosterone has been found to impact cortical thickness (CTh) across the whole brain, suggesting that it may also regulate the structural relationship, or covariance, between the amygdala and CTh. Here, we examined testosterone-related covariance between amygdala volumes and whole-brain CTh, as well as its relationship to aggression levels, in a longitudinal sample of children, adolescents, and young adults 6–22 years old. We found: (1) testosterone-specific modulation of the covariance between the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC); (2) a significant relationship between amygdala-mPFC covariance and levels of aggression; and (3) mediation effects of amygdala-mPFC covariance on the relationship between testosterone and aggression. These effects were independent of sex, age, pubertal stage, estradiol levels and anxious-depressed symptoms. These findings are consistent with prior evidence that testosterone targets the neural circuits regulating affect and impulse regulation, and show, for the first time in humans, how androgen-dependent organizational effects may regulate a very specific, aggression-related structural brain phenotype from childhood to young adulthood.