Trait dominance promotes reflexive staring at masked angry body postures

Domestic Violence From a Child Perspective: Impact of an Immersive Virtual Reality Experience on Men With a History of Intimate Partner Violent Behavior

Domestic violence has long-term negative consequences on children. In this study, men with a history of partner aggression and a control group of non-offenders were embodied in a child's body from a first-person perspective in virtual reality (VR). From this perspective, participants witnessed a scene of domestic violence where a male avatar assaulted a female avatar. We evaluated the impact of the experience on emotion recognition skills and heart rate deceleration responses. We found that the experience mainly impacted the recognition of angry facial expressions. The results also indicate that males with a history of partner aggression had larger physiological responses during an explicit violent event (when the virtual abuser threw a telephone) compared with controls, while their physiological reactions were less pronounced when the virtual abuser invaded the victim's personal space. We show that embodiment from a child's perspective during a conflict situation in VR impacts emotion recognition, physiological reactions, and attitudes towards violence. We provide initial evidence of the potential of VR in the rehabilitation and neuropsychological assessment of males with a history of domestic violence, especially in relation to children.

Sniffing submissiveness? Oxytocin administration in severe psychopathy

Psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with criminal behavior and violent recidivism, and therefore a burden to society. Social dominance is one of the characteristics of psychopathy that might contribute to these problems. Nevertheless, only few studies have objectively measured the relationship between socially dominant behavior and psychopathy. Therefore, the current study assessed performance of 21 forensic PCL-R confirmed psychopathic patients and 24 normal controls on a gaze aversion task, in which slower gaze aversion from masked angry faces compared to masked happy faces is a measure of reactive dominance. Moreover, the current study assessed the potential beneficial effects of the neuropeptide oxytocin. The results showed that psychopaths were not more dominant on the gaze aversion task compared to normal controls. However, the severity of psychopathy was positively correlated with reactive dominance. Crucially, a single nasal spray administration of oxytocin abolished the connection between psychopathy and reactive dominance. This implies that socially dominant psychopaths might benefit from oxytocin administration.

No evidence for mnemonic modulation of interocularly suppressed visual input

Visual working memory (VWM) allows for keeping visual information available for upcoming goal-directed behavior, while new visual input is processed concurrently. Interactions between the mnemonic and perceptual systems cause VWM to affect the processing of visual input in a content-specific manner: visual input that is initially suppressed from consciousness is detected faster when it matches rather than mismatches the content of VWM. It is currently under debate whether such mnemonic influences on perception occur prior to or after conscious access. To address this issue, we investigated whether VWM content modulates the neural response to visual input that remains suppressed from consciousness. We measured fMRI responses to interocularly suppressed stimuli in 20 human participants performing a delayed match-to-sample task: Participants were retro-cued to memorize one of two geometrical shapes for subsequent recognition. During retention, an interocularly suppressed peripheral stimulus (the probe) was briefly presented, which was either of the cued (memorized) or uncued (not memorized) shape category. We found no evidence that VWM content modulated the neural response to the probe. Substantial evidence for the absence of this modulation was found despite leveraging a highly liberal analysis approach: (1) selecting regions of interest that were particularly prone to detecting said modulation, and (2) using directional Bayesian tests favoring the presence of the hypothesized modulation. We did observe faster detection of memory-matching compared to memory-mismatching probes in a behavioral control experiment, thus validating the stimulus set. We conclude that VWM impacts the processing of visual input only once suppression is mostly alleviated.

Dominant men are faster in decision-making situations and exhibit a distinct neural signal for promptness

Social dominance, the main organizing principle of social hierarchies, facilitates priority access to resources by dominant individuals. Throughout taxa, individuals are more likely to become dominant if they act first in social situations and acting fast may provide evolutionary advantage; yet whether fast decision-making is a behavioral predisposition of dominant persons outside of social contexts is not known. Following characterization of participants for social dominance motivation, we found that, indeed, men high in social dominance respond faster–without loss of accuracy–than those low in dominance across a variety of decision-making tasks. Both groups did not differ in a simple reaction task. Then, we selected a decision-making task and applied high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to assess temporal dynamics of brain activation through event related potentials. We found that promptness to respond in the choice task in dominant individuals is related to a strikingly amplified brain signal at approximately 240 ms post-stimulus presentation. Source imaging analyses identified higher activity in the left insula and in the cingulate, right inferior temporal and right angular gyri in high than in low dominance participants. Our findings suggest that promptness to respond in choice situations, regardless of social context, is a biomarker for social disposition.

Testosterone abolishes implicit subordination in social anxiety

Neuro-evolutionary theories describe social anxiety as habitual subordinate tendencies acquired through a recursive cycle of social defeat and submissive reactions. If so, the steroid hormone testosterone might be of therapeutic value, as testosterone is a main force behind implicit dominance drive in many species including humans. We combined these two theories to investigate whether the tendency to submit to the dominance of others is an implicit mechanism in social anxiety (Study-1), and whether this can be relieved through testosterone administration (Study-2). Using interactive eye-tracking we demonstrate that socially anxious humans more rapidly avert gaze from subliminal angry eye contact (Study-1). We replicate this effect of implicit subordination in social anxiety in an independent sample, which is subsequently completely abolished after a single placebo-controlled sublingual testosterone administration (Study-2). These findings provide crucial evidence for hormonal and behavioral treatment strategies that specifically target mechanisms of dominance and subordination in social anxiety.

When anger dominates the mind: Increased motor corticospinal excitability in the face of threat

Threat demands fast and adaptive reactions that are manifested at the physiological, behavioral, and phenomenological level and are responsive to the direction of threat and its severity for the individual. Here, we investigated the effects of threat directed toward or away from the observer on motor corticospinal excitability and explicit recognition. Sixteen healthy right‐handed volunteers completed a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) task and a separate three‐alternative forced‐choice emotion recognition task. Single‐pulse TMS to the left primary motor cortex was applied to measure motor evoked potentials from the right abductor pollicis brevis in response to dynamic angry, fearful, and neutral bodily expressions with blurred faces directed toward or away from the observer. Results showed that motor corticospinal excitability increased independent of direction of anger compared with fear and neutral. In contrast, anger was better recognized when directed toward the observer compared with when directed away from the observer, while the opposite pattern was found for fear. The present results provide evidence for the differential effects of threat direction on explicit recognition and motor corticospinal excitability. In the face of threat, motor corticospinal excitability increases independently of the direction of anger, indicative of the importance of more automatic reactions to threat.

Predicting Aggressive Tendencies by Visual Attention Bias Associated with Hostile Emotions

The goal of the current study is to clarify the relationship between social information processing (e.g., visual attention to cues of hostility, hostility attribution bias, and facial expression emotion labeling) and aggressive tendencies. Thirty adults were recruited in the eye-tracking study that measured various components in social information processing. Baseline aggressive tendencies were measured using the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (AQ). Visual attention towards hostile objects was measured as the proportion of eye gaze fixation duration on cues of hostility. Hostility attribution bias was measured with the rating results for emotions of characters in the images. The results show that the eye gaze duration on hostile characters was significantly inversely correlated with the AQ score and less eye contact with an angry face. The eye gaze duration on hostile object was not significantly associated with hostility attribution bias, although hostility attribution bias was significantly positively associated with the AQ score. Our findings suggest that eye gaze fixation time towards non-hostile cues may predict aggressive tendencies.

Neuroanatomical Markers of Social Hierarchy Recognition in Humans: A Combined ERP/MRI Study

Social hierarchy is an ubiquitous principle of social organization across animal species. Although some progress has been made in our understanding of how humans infer hierarchical identity, the neuroanatomical basis for perceiving key social dimensions of others remains unexplored. Here, we combined event-related potentials and structural MRI to reveal the neuroanatomical substrates of early status recognition. We designed a covertly simulated hierarchical setting in which participants performed a task either with a superior or with an inferior player. Participants showed higher amplitude in the N170 component when presented with a picture of a superior player compared with an inferior player. Crucially, the magnitude of this effect correlated with brain morphology of the posterior cingulate cortex, superior temporal gyrus, insula, fusiform gyrus, and caudate nucleus. We conclude that early recognition of social hierarchies relies on the structural properties of a network involved in the automatic recognition of social identity.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT

Humans can perceive social hierarchies very rapidly, an ability that is key for social interactions. However, some individuals are more sensitive to hierarchical information than others. Currently, it is unknown how brain structure supports such fast-paced processes of social hierarchy perception and their individual differences. Here, we addressed this issue for the first time by combining the high temporal resolution of event-related potentials (ERPs) and the high spatial resolution of structural MRI. This methodological approach allowed us to unveil a novel association between ERP neuromarkers of social hierarchy perception and the morphology of several cortical and subcortical brain regions typically assumed to play a role in automatic processes of social cognition. Our results are a step forward in our understanding of the human social brain.

The Body as a Tool for Anger Awareness--Differential Effects of Angry Facial and Bodily Expressions on Suppression from Awareness

Emotional signals are perceived whether or not we are aware of it. The evidence so far mostly came from studies with facial expressions. Here, we investigated whether the pattern of non-conscious face expression perception is found for whole body expressions. Continuous flash suppression (CFS) was used to measure the time for neutral, fearful, and angry facial or bodily expressions to break from suppression. We observed different suppression time patterns for emotions depending on whether the stimuli were faces or bodies. The suppression time for anger was shortest for bodily expressions, but longest for the facial expressions. This pattern indicates different processing and detection mechanisms for faces and bodies outside awareness, and suggests that awareness mechanisms associated with dorsal structures might play a role in becoming conscious of angry bodily expressions.

Interocular suppression prevents interference in a flanker task

Executive control of attention refers to processes that detect and resolve conflict among competing thoughts and actions. Despite the high-level nature of this faculty, the role of awareness in executive control of attention is not well understood. In this study, we used interocular suppression to mask the flankers in an arrow flanker task, in which the flankers and the target arrow were presented simultaneously in order to elicit executive control of attention. Participants were unable to detect the flanker arrows or to reliably identify their direction when masked. There was a typical conflict effect (prolonged reaction time and increased error rate under flanker-target incongruent condition compared to congruent condition) when the flanker arrows were unmasked, while the conflict effect was absent when the flanker arrows were masked with interocular suppression. These results suggest that blocking awareness of competing stimuli with interocular suppression prevents the involvement of executive control of attention.