Hit or Run: Exploring Aggressive and Avoidant Reactions to Interpersonal Provocation Using a Novel Fight-or-Escape Paradigm (FOE)

Interpersonal provocation presents an approach-avoidance conflict to the provoked person: responding aggressively might yield the joy of retribution, whereas withdrawal can provide safety. Experimental aggression studies typically measure only retaliation intensity, neglecting whether individuals want to confront the provocateur at all. To overcome this shortcoming of previous measures, we developed and validated the Fight-or-Escape paradigm (FOE). The FOE is a competitive reaction time task in which the winner can choose the volume of a sound blast to be directed at his/her opponent. Participants face two ostensible opponents who consistently select either high or low punishments. At the beginning of each trial, subjects are given the chance to avoid the encounter for a limited number of times. In a first experiment (n=27, all women), we found that fear potentiation of the startle response was related to lower scores in a composite measure of aggression and avoidance against the provoking opponent. In a second experiment (n=34, 13 men), we altered the paradigm such that participants faced the opponents in alternating rather than in random order. Participants completed the FOE as well as the Dot-Probe Task (DPT) and the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT). Subjects with higher approach bias scores in the AAT avoided the provoking opponent less frequently. Hence, individuals with high threat reactivity and low approach motivation displayed more avoidant responses to provocation, whereas participants high in approach motivation were more likely to engage in aggressive interactions when provoked. The FOE is thus a promising laboratory measure of avoidance and aggression

Endogenous testosterone is associated with lower amygdala reactivity to angry faces and reduced aggressive behavior in healthy young women

Testosterone and cortisol have been proposed to influence aggressive behavior by altering the neural processing of facial threat signals. However, this has not been investigated in direct social interactions. Here, we explored the joint impact of testosterone, cortisol, and brain reactivity to anger expressions on women's reactive aggression in the Social Threat Aggression Paradigm (STAP). The STAP is a competitive reaction time task in which the purported opponent displays either an angry or a neutral facial expression at the beginning of each trial and delivers increasingly loud sound blasts to the participants, successfully provoking them. Strikingly, salivary testosterone at scan-time was negatively related to both aggression and basolateral amygdala (BLA) reactivity to angry faces, whereas cortisol had no effect. When the opponent looked angry, BLA-orbitofrontal coupling was reduced, and BLA reactivity was positively related to aggression. The latter relationship was fully mediated by bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) activation. Our results thus support previous neurobiological models of aggression, and extend them by demonstrating that fast amygdala responses to threat modulate STG activity in order to favor aggressive retaliation. Furthermore, our study agrees with recent evidence underscoring a fear-reducing and strategically prosocial effect of testosterone on human social behavior

Performing a Motor Action Enhances Social Reward Processing and Modulates the Neural Processing of Predictive Cues

ERP data for Luft, Atchoum & Beyer, 202

How social contexts affect cognition: mentalizing interferes with sense of agency during voluntary action

Living in complex social structures, humans have evolved a unique aptitude for mentalizing. On one view, mentalizing has shaped neurocognitive evolution, yet, little is known about how mentalizing interacts with other cognitive processes. For social animals, the actions of one individual often impact others. “Sense of agency” refers to the feeling of control over the outcomes of one’s actions, providing a precursor of responsibility. Here, we test a model of how social context influences this key feature of human action, even when action outcomes are not specifically social. We show that the presence of another potential agent reduces sense of agency for both positive and negative outcomes. This dissociates social modulation of sense of agency from classical self-serving bias, since the latter would reduce sense of agency only for undesirable outcomes. Instead, we propose that the cognitive load involved in decision-making is increased by the requirement to mentalize, and compute the possible actions of others, and their outcomes. In a second experiment, we test this hypothesis by comparing two situations, in which participants either need to consider potential actions of another person, or potential failures of a causal mechanism not involving any person. We find reduced sense of agency only in the social condition, suggesting that the presence of another intentional agent has a unique influence on the cognitive processes underlying one’s own voluntary action. Previous work primarily focussed on social facilitation of human cognition. However, when people must incorporate the potential actions of others into their decision-making, we show that the resulting cognitive load reduces individuals’ feelings of control

How social contexts affect cognition: mentalizing interferes with sense of agency during voluntary action

Living in complex social structures, humans have evolved a unique aptitude for mentalizing. On one view, mentalizing has shaped neurocognitive evolution, yet, little is known about how mentalizing interacts with other cognitive processes. For social animals, the actions of one individual often impact others. “Sense of agency” refers to the feeling of control over the outcomes of one’s actions, providing a precursor of responsibility. Here, we test a model of how social context influences this key feature of human action, even when action outcomes are not specifically social. We show that the presence of another potential agent reduces sense of agency for both positive and negative outcomes. This dissociates social modulation of sense of agency from classical self-serving bias, since the latter would reduce sense of agency only for undesirable outcomes. Instead, we propose that the cognitive load involved in decision-making is increased by the requirement to mentalize, and compute the possible actions of others, and their outcomes. In a second experiment, we test this hypothesis by comparing two situations, in which participants either need to consider potential actions of another person, or potential failures of a causal mechanism not involving any person. We find reduced sense of agency only in the social condition, suggesting that the presence of another intentional agent has a unique influence on the cognitive processes underlying one’s own voluntary action. Previous work primarily focussed on social facilitation of human cognition. However, when people must incorporate the potential actions of others into their decision-making, we show that the resulting cognitive load reduces individuals’ feelings of control

Neural basis of shame and guilt experience in women with borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by instability of affect, emotion dysregulation, and interpersonal dysfunction. Especially shame and guilt, so-called self-conscious emotions, are of central clinical relevance to BPD. However, only few experimental studies have focused on shame or guilt in BPD and none investigated their neurobiological underpinnings. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we took a scenario-based approach to experimentally induce feelings of shame, guilt, and disgust with neutral scenarios as control condition. We included 19 women with BPD (age 26.4 ± 5.8 years; DSM-IV diagnosed; medicated) and 22 healthy female control subjects (age 26.4 ± 4.6 years; matched for age and verbal IQ). Compared to controls, women with BPD reported more intense feelings when being confronted with affective scenarios, especially higher levels of shame, guilt, and fear. We found increased amygdala reactivity in BPD compared to controls for shame and guilt, but not for disgust scenarios (p = 0.05 FWE corrected at the cluster level; p < 0.0001 cluster defining threshold). Exploratory analyses showed that this was caused by a diminished habituation in women with BPD relative to control participants. This effect was specific to guilt and shame scenarios as both groups showed amygdala habituation to disgust scenarios. Our work suggests that heightened shame and guilt experience in BPD is not related to increased amygdala activity per se, but rather to decreased habituation to self-conscious emotions. This provides an explanation for the inconsistencies in previous imaging work on amygdala involvement in BPD as well as the typically slow progress in the psychotherapy of dysfunctional self-conscious emotions in this patient group

Reduced Sense of Agency in Human-Robot interaction

In the presence of others, sense of agency (SoA), i.e. the perceived relation-ship between our own actions and external events, is reduced. This effect is thought to contribute to diffusion of responsibility. The present study aimed at examining humans’ SoA when interacting with an artificial embodied agent. Young adults participated in a task alongside the Cozmo robot (Anki Robotics). Participants were asked to perform costly actions (i.e. losing vari-ous amounts of points) to stop an inflating balloon from exploding. In 50% of trials, only the participant could stop the inflation of the balloon (Individ-ual condition). In the remaining trials, both Cozmo and the participant were in charge of preventing the balloon from bursting (Joint condition). The longer the players waited before pressing the “stop” key, the smaller amount of points that was subtracted. However, in case the balloon burst, partici-pants would lose the largest amount of points. In the joint condition, no points were lost if Cozmo stopped the balloon. At the end of each trial, par-ticipants rated how much control they perceived over the outcome of the tri-al. Results showed that when participants successfully stopped the balloon, they rated their SoA lower in the Joint than in the Individual condition, in-dependently of the amount of lost points. This suggests that interacting with robots affects SoA, similarly to interacting with other human

Attribution of intentional agency towards robots reduces one’s own sense of agency

In the presence of others, sense of agency (SoA), i.e. the perceived relationship between our own actions and external events, is reduced. The present study aimed at investigating whether the phenomenon of reduced SoA is observed in human-robot interaction, similarly to human-human interaction. To this end, we tested SoA when people interacted with a robot (Experiment 1), with a passive, non-agentic air pump (Experiment 2), or when they interacted with both a robot and a human being (Experiment 3). Participants were asked to rate the perceived control they felt on the outcome of their action while performing a diffusion of responsibility task. Results showed that the intentional agency attributed to the artificial entity differently affect the performance and the perceived SoA on the outcome of the task. Experiment 1 showed that, when participants successfully performed an action, they rated SoA over the outcome as lower in trials in which the robot was also able to act (but did not), compared to when they were performing the task alone. However, this did not occur in Experiment 2, where the artificial entity was an air pump, which had the same influence on the task as the robot, but in a passive manner and thus lacked intentional agency. Results of Experiment 3 showed that SoA was reduced similarly for the human and robot agents, threby indicating that attribution of intentional agency plays a crucial role in reduction of SoA. Together, our results suggest that interacting with robotic agents affects SoA, similarly to interacting with other humans, but differently from interacting with non-agentic mechanical devices. This has important implications for the applied of social robotics, where a subjective decrease in SoA could have negative consequences, such as in robot-assisted care in hospitals

Reduced Sense of Agency in Human-Robot interaction

In the presence of others, sense of agency (SoA), i.e. the perceived relation-ship between our own actions and external events, is reduced. This effect is thought to contribute to diffusion of responsibility. The present study aimed at examining humans’ SoA when interacting with an artificial embodied agent. Young adults participated in a task alongside the Cozmo robot (Anki Robotics). Participants were asked to perform costly actions (i.e. losing vari-ous amounts of points) to stop an inflating balloon from exploding. In 50% of trials, only the participant could stop the inflation of the balloon (Individ-ual condition). In the remaining trials, both Cozmo and the participant were in charge of preventing the balloon from bursting (Joint condition). The longer the players waited before pressing the “stop” key, the smaller amount of points that was subtracted. However, in case the balloon burst, partici-pants would lose the largest amount of points. In the joint condition, no points were lost if Cozmo stopped the balloon. At the end of each trial, par-ticipants rated how much control they perceived over the outcome of the tri-al. Results showed that when participants successfully stopped the balloon, they rated their SoA lower in the Joint than in the Individual condition, in-dependently of the amount of lost points. This suggests that interacting with robots affects SoA, similarly to interacting with other human