High levels of psychopathic traits increase the risk of transferring reactive aggression to innocent people after provocation: Evidence from an ERP study
Introduction
Psychopathy is an intriguing concept for both researchers and laypeople. At the same time, however, it is one of the most disturbing and hardly treatable mental disorders in the world (Vien, 2006). Psychopathy is associated with a collection of affective, interpersonal, and behavioral features, including shallow affect, lack of remorse or guilt, callousness, grandiosity, pathological lying, manipulation, irresponsibility, impulsivity, poor self-control, and sensation seeking (Cleckley, 1951; Hare, 1980; Harpur, Hare, & Hakstian, 1989). About 15∼20% of the forensic population and about 1% of the general population (Glenn, Kurzban, & Raine, 2011; Hare, 1991) meets the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy. However, it has been recognized that psychopathic features also exist as personality traits (Edens, Marcus, Lilienfeld, & Poythress, 2006; Glenn et al., 2011; Guay, Ruscio, Knight, & Hare, 2007). High levels of psychopathic traits can be readily found in normal-functioning non-forensic samples without fulfilling the criteria of psychopathy (Benning, Patrick, Hicks, Blonigen, & Krueger, 2003; Ross, Benning, Patrick, Thompson, & Thurston, 2009).
Psychopathic traits are one of the most widely recognized risk factors for aggressive behavior (Guerra & White, 2017). Aggression can be divided into proactive aggression (PA; or instrumental aggression) and reactive aggression (RA; or impulsive aggression) based on the functions of behavior (Poulin & Boivin, 2000; Preston, Anestis, Watts, & Lilienfeld, 2018). Proactive aggression has been described as a goal-directed, forethoughtful and organized act without previous provocation. This form of aggressive behavior functions as a means to gain resources or attains domination and intimidation (Berkowitz, 1983; Dodge & Coie, 1987). In contrast, reactive aggression refers to an impulsive and emotion-driven act that involves high affective-physiological arousal. This form of aggressive behavior occurs as a hostile response to interpersonal provocation or threat (Chase, O’Leary, & Heyman, 2001; Dodge & Coie, 1987; Poulin & Boivin, 2000).
Extensive research exists on the relationship between psychopathy and proactive aggression—yielding a consistent and robust finding across forensic and non-forensic populations. The psychopathic measures from either clinical diagnostic tools or self-report personality scales are positively related to proactive aggression (Cima & Raine, 2009; Reidy, Zeichner, Miller, & Martinez, 2007; Walsh, Swogger, & Kosson, 2009). However, less consistent findings are available on the association between psychopathic traits and reactive aggression across different population samples. Non-forensic individuals with higher psychopathic scores showed significantly greater reactive aggression in a laboratory aggression paradigm (Lotze, Veit, Anders, & Birbaumer, 2007; Reidy et al., 2007; Reidy, Zeichner, & Martinez, 2008; Reidy, Zeichner, & Seibert, 2011). On the contrary, forensic individuals with higher psychopathic scores showed significantly less reactive aggression using the same experimental paradigm (Veit et al., 2010). Other research on both youth and adult offenders demonstrated that psychopathy is more associated with proactive aggression than reactive aggression (Bezdjian, Tuvblad, Raine, & Baker, 2011; Cima & Raine, 2009; Lehmann & Ittel, 2012). However, a recent meta-analysis study revealed that an increased level of an individual’s psychopathic traits is associated with an enhanced propensity of both proactive aggression and reactive aggression—although the effect size is significantly larger for self-report scales in general population than that for clinical assessments in forensic population (Blais, Solodukhin, & Forth, 2014). Therefore, whether higher psychopathic traits facilitate reactive aggression remains inconclusive. Further research is needed to clarify the relationship between psychopathic traits and the risk of reactive aggression.
To date, reactive aggression has been widely studied in controlled laboratory settings using reliable and well-validated behavioral approaches (Krämer, Jansma, Tempelmann, & Munte, 2007; Krämer, Riba, Richter, & Münte, 2011; Lotze et al., 2007). The Taylor Aggression Paradigm (TAP) is one of the most frequently used measures of reactive aggression (Taylor, 1967). One recognized version of the TAP involves participants competing against a fictitious opponent in a reaction-time game in which they are asked to respond as fast as possible to win—whereby the outcome of the game is predetermined by the experimenter (Krämer, Büttner, Roth, & Münte, 2008). For each single trial of the game, one player has to select the intensity of a prospective punishment for the other player. A high-intensity punishment selected by the fictitious opponent is regarded as a provocation; it can elicit reactive aggression in participants—administering a similar high-level punishment against the opponent. Different types of aversive stimuli are used as effective punishment, including electric shock, unpleasant noise, and pneumatic pressure (Krämer et al., 2007, 2008; Lotze et al., 2007; Taylor, 1967; Veit et al., 2010).
A recent study further split the TAP into a passive and an active phase. For the passive phase, participants can only receive punishment when losing but without an opportunity to punish the opponent when winning, whereas in the active phase participants can punish the opponent when winning but without receiving any punishment even when losing (Beyens, Yu, Han, Zhang, & Zhou, 2015). This modification enhances the effectiveness of provocation and highly motivates subsequent reactive aggression since participants continuously experience high-level punishment without being able for immediate revenge.
A plethora of TAP studies have consistently demonstrated that people adopt a tit-for-tat strategy and exhibit significantly more reactive aggression after being provoked (Beyer, Munte, Gottlich, & Kramer, 2015; Brunnlieb, Munte, Kramer, Tempelmann, & Heldmann, 2013; Krämer et al., 2007, 2011). Previous studies allowed participants to retaliate against provokers, which mirrored most revenge situations occurring in real daily lives (Beyens et al., 2015; Chester & DeWall, 2016; Ping et al., 2018). However, as known from some other types of violence—including school shootings—some offenders, when cornered, might take revenge on innocent people to vent their frustration caused by someone else. Although a few studies have investigated such a phenomenon in a controlled laboratory setting (Reijntjes, Kamphuis, Thomaes, Bushman, & Telch, 2013; Reijntjes, Thomaes et al., 2013), it remains unknown what kind of individuals are more inclined to retaliate against innocent people after provocation. Considering that psychopathic traits are closely associated with aggressive behavior (Lotze et al., 2007; Reidy et al., 2007, 2008; Reidy et al., 2011), individual differences of psychopathic traits might have an impact on transferring reactive aggression to innocent people. However, as far as we know, few studies have investigated this phenomenon. Hence, a need exists in identifying the behavioral and especially the neuropsychological signatures for antisocial-aggressive behavior toward the innocents by people with different levels of psychopathic traits.
Measuring different event-related potentials (ERPs) components while performing the TAP allows investigating the neuropsychological underpinnings of reactive aggression. First, the N2 component—a negative deflection distributed around 200∼300 ms post-onset—has been frequently associated with reactive aggression as measured with the TAP (Beyens et al., 2015; Krämer et al., 2008; Nieuwenhuis, Slagter, von Geusau, Heslenfeld, & Holroyd, 2005). For example, N2 amplitudes induced by a high relative to a low provocation are only present in individuals with higher aggressive traits (Krämer et al., 2008).
Second, the feedback-related negativity (FRN) component, occurring at about 250 ms post-stimulus, is usually observed during the TAP outcome stage (Beyens et al., 2015; Krämer et al., 2008; Ping et al., 2018; Wiswede et al., 2011). The FRN is being known as an index of a feedback valence evaluation (Müller, Möller, Rodriguez-Fornells, & Münte, 2005; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2005). A more negative FRN is expected when people experience or observe a negative outcome (e.g., monetary loss, game loss) (Beyens et al., 2015; Fukushima & Hiraki, 2006; Heldmann, Russeler, & Munte, 2008; Ping et al., 2018; Yeung, Holroyd, & Cohen, 2005). Further, a more negative FRN elicited by losing a trial is only found in individuals with high compared to low aggressive behavior (Krämer et al., 2008).
Third, the P3 component is a positive deflection observed at about 300∼600 ms post-stimulus onset (Kim & Jung, 2014) and is associated with attention-orienting processes, memory operations, and inhibitory control (Friedman, Cycowicz, & Gaeta, 2001; Polich, 2007). A decreased P3 component is closely associated with antisocial and aggressive behavior (Bingren, Chanchan, Qisha, Guorong, & Wei, 2016; Gao & Raine, 2009; Pasion, Fernandes, Pereira, & Barbosa, 2018; Verona & Bresin, 2015). Moreover, an atypical P3 component is also observed for individuals with higher psychopathic traits in forensic and non-forensic samples (Anderson & Stanford, 2012; Carlson, Thai, & McLarnon, 2009; Drislane, Vaidyanathan, & Patrick, 2013; Kim & Jung, 2014).
In this study, we combined a modified TAP with ERP recordings to examine how individual differences of psychopathic traits are related to the behavior of transferring reactive aggression to innocent people after strong provocation. We also asked the same participants to complete a subsequent behavioral experiment with a low provocation to examine whether individuals with higher psychopathic traits would show more aggression toward unrelated people regardless of the level of provocation. Participants from an undergraduate student population were divided into a high psychopathic (HP) traits group and a low psychopathic (LP) traits group based on the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP) (Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995). They were asked to compete with two fictitious opponents in a reaction-time game during two phases. For the passive phase, participants were provoked by the first opponent who selected high-intensity punishment most of the time and were punished after losing a trial—but were unable to punish the opponent even after winning a trial. During the active phase, they played against the second opponent, who was not responsible for the provocation in the passive phase.
At the behavioral level, we hypothesized that the HP group (compared to the LP group) selects more often a high-intensive punishment for innocent opponents in the active phase only after being strongly provoked in the passive phase. At the neural level, we predicted that the HP group (compared to the LP group) displays a larger N2 amplitude and a smaller P3 amplitude—reflecting the level of aggressiveness and impulsive-antisocial behavior—while deciding the punishment intensity for the innocent opponent. Further, we expected a more negative FRN for losing than for winning trials in the HP group (compared to the LP group) after receiving feedback about the outcome of the trial—reflecting the negative valence of being not able to punish after losing the trial.
Section snippets
Participants
The current study used the LSRP to measure individual psychopathic traits in a college student sample. Questionnaire data were obtained from 272 undergraduate students (122 females, 150 males, age [mean ± standard deviation]: 19.53 ± 1.43 years). Participants were sorted based on their total LSRP scores (Shao & Lee, 2017): participants scoring at the top 25% (≥ 59) or bottom 25% (≤ 48) within the total sample were invited to participate in the ERP experiment. Many of the participants who met
Questionnaire results
The questionnaire results showed that the HP compared to the LP group demonstrated significantly higher LSRP scores on primary (t (48) = 12.37, p < 0.001, d = 3.50), secondary (t (48) = 9.03, p < 0.001, d = 2.56), and total (t (48) = 16.68, p < 0.001, d = 4.72) psychopathy (Table 1). Further, the HP group showed remarkably higher RPQ scores than the LP group on proactive (t (48) = 5.03, p < 0.001, d = 1.42), reactive (t (48) = 5.17, p < 0.001, d = 1.46), and total (t (48) = 6.22, p < 0.001, d =
Discussion
In this study, we combined a modified TAP with ERP recordings to investigate how individual psychopathic traits would impact on the tendency of transferring reactive aggression to an innocent person after being provoked by another person. Our behavioral results showed that individuals with higher psychopathic traits were more likely to make high-intensity punishment decisions toward an innocent person after high-level provocation compared to low-level provocation. Our ERP results demonstrated
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31500907).
Author contributions statements
QY and YW developed this study. YW programmed the experiment. YW, BZ, SY collected the data. YW performed the data analyses. QY and YW drafted the initial manuscript. FK, QY, and TX made critical revisions and polished the article. All the authors have read the final version of the manuscript and approved of its publication.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declared that they do not have any conflicts of interest in this paper.
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