Winners are commonly assumed to compete more aggressively than losers. Here, we find overwhelming evidence for the opposite. We first demonstrate that low-ranking teams commit more fouls than they receive in top-tier soccer, ice hockey, and basketball men’s leagues. We replicate this effect in the laboratory, showing that male participants deliver louder sound blasts to a rival when placed in a low-status position. Using neuroimaging, we characterize brain activity patterns that encode competitive status as well as those that facilitate status-dependent aggression in healthy young men. These analyses reveal three key findings. First, anterior hippocampus and striatum contain multivariate representations of competitive status. Second, interindividual differences in status-dependent aggression are linked with a sharper status differentiation in the striatum and with greater reactivity to status-enhancing victories in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Third, activity in ventromedial, ventrolateral, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with trial-wise increases in status-dependent aggressive behavior. Taken together, our results run counter to narratives glorifying aggression in competitive situations. Rather, we show that those in the lower ranks of skill-based hierarchies are more likely to behave aggressively and identify the potential neural basis of this phenomenon.

Persons with Tourette syndrome show altered social behaviors, such as echophenomena and increased personal distress in emotional situations. These symptoms may reflect an overactive mirror neuron system, causing both increased automatic imitation and a stronger tendency to share others’ emotions. To test this, we measured the individual level of echophenomena with a video protocol and experimentally induced empathy for pain in 21 participants with Tourette syndrome and 25 matched controls. In the empathy for pain paradigm, pictures of hands and feet in painful or neutral situations were presented, while we measured participants’ EEG and skin conductance response. Changes in somatosensory mu suppression during the observation of the pictures and pain ratings were compared between groups and correlations were calculated with the occurrence of echophenomena, self-reported empathy and clinical measures. Our Tourette syndrome sample showed significantly more echophenomena than controls, but the groups showed no behavioral differences in empathic abilities. However, controls, but not patients with Tourette syndrome, showed the predicted increased mu suppression when watching painful compared to neutral actions. While echophenomena were present in all persons with Tourette syndrome, the hypothesis of an overactive mirror neuron system in Tourette syndrome could not be substantiated. On the contrary, the Tourette syndrome group showed a noticeable lack of mu attenuation in response to pain stimuli. In conclusion, we found a first hint of altered processing of others’ emotional states in a brain region associated with the mirror neuron system.

Motivational influences on cognitive control play an important role in shaping human behavior. Cognitive facilitation through motivators such as prospective reward or punishment is thought to depend on regions from the dopaminergic mesocortical network, primarily the ventral tegmental area (VTA), inferior frontal junction (IFJ), and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). However, how interactions between these regions relate to motivated control remains elusive. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we used dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to investigate effective connectivity between left IFJ, ACC, and VTA in a task‐switching paradigm comprising three distinct motivational conditions (prospective monetary reward or punishment and a control condition). We found that while prospective punishment significantly facilitated switching between tasks on a behavioral level, interactions between IFJ, ACC, and VTA were characterized by modulations through prospective reward but not punishment. Our DCM results show that IFJ and VTA modulate ACC activity in parallel rather than by interaction to serve task demands in reward‐based cognitive control. Our findings further demonstrate that prospective reward and punishment differentially affect neural control mechanisms to initiate decision‐making.

Abstract. Research on the neural mechanisms underlying Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) has mostly concentrated on abnormalities in basal ganglia circuits. Recent alternative accounts, however, focused more on social and affective aspects. Individuals with GTS show peculiarities in their social and affective domain, including echophenomena, coprolalia, and nonobscene socially inappropriate behavior. This article reviews the experimental and theoretical work done on the social symptoms of GTS. We discuss the role of different social cognitive and affective functions and associated brain networks, namely, the social-decision-making system, theory-of-mind functions, and the so-called “mirror-neuron” system. Although GTS affects social interactions in many ways, and although the syndrome includes aberrant social behavior, the underlying cognitive, affective, and neural processes remain to be investigated.

Winners are commonly assumed to compete more aggressively than losers. Here, we find overwhelming evidence for the opposite. We first demonstrate that low-ranking teams commit more fouls than they receive in top-tier soccer, ice hockey, and basketball leagues. We replicate this effect in the laboratory, showing that participants deliver louder sound blasts to a rival when placed in a low-status position. Using neuroimaging, we characterize brain activity patterns that encode competitive status as well as those that facilitate status-dependent aggression. These analyses reveal three key findings. First, anterior hippocampus and striatum contain multivariate representations of competitive status. Second, interindividual differences in status-dependent aggression are linked with a sharper status differentiation in the striatum and with greater reactivity to status-enhancing victories in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.Third, activity in ventromedial, ventrolateral, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with trial-wise increases in status-dependent aggressive behavior. Taken together, our results run counter to narratives glorifying aggression in competitive situations. Rather, we show that those in the lower ranks of skill-based hierarchies are more likely to behave aggressively and identify the potential neural basis of this phenomenon.