Brief Report
Trait aggression is related to anger-modulated deficits in response inhibition

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Abstract

The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of emotion-modulated response inhibition in individual difference in the disposition towards aggressive behavior (i.e. trait aggression). One hundred and twelve undergraduate participants completed a behavioral measure of emotion modulated response inhibition (an emotional go/no-go task), self-report measures previously shown to predict aggression (Big-5 traits, impulsivity), and the Aggression Questionnaire (AQ) as a measure of trait aggression. Results show that deficient inhibition to angry, but not happy, faces were related to trait aggression but not to other traits. These findings provide support for the role of specific top down executive control mechanisms in the regulation of aggressive tendencies and highlight the importance of examining these mechanisms in an emotional context.

Introduction

The identification and explanation of individual differences in the disposition to engage in aggressive behavior has long been recognized as an important research goal. The main aim of the current research was to use a behavioral paradigm that allowed us to measure individual differences in anger modulated inhibition deficits. In particular, using an emotional go/no-go task, we investigated the relation between inhibition deficits in response to anger and non-anger stimuli and trait aggressiveness (Buss & Perry, 1992), a personality trait that has been shown to predict aggressive behavior across a wide range of conditions (e.g., Bettencourt, Talley, Benjamin, & Valentine, 2006).

Section snippets

Trait aggression

Dispositional or trait aggression is typically conceptualized as an individual’s predisposition to engage in verbal and physical aggression, to hold hostile cognitions, and to experience and express anger (Buss & Perry, 1992). Empirically, trait aggression has been found to predict increased levels of aggressive behavior in provoking and neutral situations (Bettencourt et al., 2006). Trait aggression is also closely related to a general disposition to experience more intense and more frequent

Executive control, anger, and aggression

Executive control processes involve a diverse set of higher-order, limited capacity processes that are involved in the conscious and deliberate top-down control and regulation of thoughts and actions (Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, & Howerter, 2000). Executive control processes may play a crucial role in the regulation of anger and aggressive behavior. For example, recent studies by Wilkowski and Robinson, 2007, Wilkowski and Robinson, 2008 link executive control to individual differences

Response inhibition

Response inhibition, the ability to suppress inappropriate and unwanted actions, is a central component of executive control (Miyake et al., 2000) and seems to be particularly important for the regulation of anger and aggressive tendencies. A frequently used measure of response inhibition is the go/no-go task. The go/no-go task assesses the ability to inhibit prepotent responses by continuously presenting a series of stimuli comprised of frequent “go” cues that participants have to respond to

Aggression and big five traits

The five-factor model of personality identifies the core dimensional components of personality as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (John & Srivastava, 1999). In this study we focused on agreeableness and neuroticism which have been consistently found to be associated with behavioral aggression (Bettencourt et al., 2006).

Aggression and impulsivity

Impulsivity has frequently been linked to socially problematic behaviors like aggression (Barratt, 1994). A widely accepted definition

Participants

Participants were 112 introductory psychology students (59 females) between the ages of 17 and 26 (mean age = 19.4) who participated for partial course credit.

Aggression Questionnaire

The Aggression Questionnaire (AQ; Buss & Perry, 1992) is a 29 item self-report measure of trait aggression. The questionnaire asks participants to rate on a scale from 1 (extremely uncharacteristic of me) to 5 (extremely characteristic of me) the degree to which statements describing behaviors and emotions are characteristic of themselves.

Results

We first created emotion-specific measures of response inhibition by computing the proportion of responses to angry and happy faces on no-go trials (errors of commission). To control for overall differences in the processing of angry and happy faces, we also created measures of attention to happy and angry faces by computing the proportion of non-responses to angry and happy faces on go-trials (errors of omission; cf. Schulz et al., 2007).

Table 1 shows the correlations between the AQ and the

Discussion

The present study contributes to recent research on the role of executive control processes in the regulation of emotions and emotion-related behavior by investigating the relation between anger-modulated response inhibition and dispositional aggression. Using an emotional go/no-go task with angry and happy faces, we predicted and found that response inhibition in response to angry faces, but not to happy faces, was related to trait aggression.

In particular, we found that a deficit in the

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