Executive cognitive functioning and aggression: Is it an issue of impulsivity?

Abstract

A large body of research has documented a relation between the executive cognitive functions (ECFs) and interpersonal aggressive behavior. A predominant theory proposes that individuals with poor ECFs are more aggressive because they are unable to inhibit impulsive behaviors. However, evidence for this relationship is typically indirect. In this study, 46 healthy men and women completed measures of ECF, the Taylor Aggression Paradigm, and the Go/No-Go discrimination task, a behavioral measure of impulsivity. Also, impulsiveness of participant responses during the aggression task was directly assessed by measuring latency of responses to provocation (''set-time''). It was hypothesized that lowquartile-scoring ECF men and women would perform more aggressively and more impulsively than high-quartile peers. Consistent with expectations, results indicated that ECF was related to aggression and to impulsivity on the Go/No-Go task. However, low-ECF men and women did not have shorter settimes; in fact, on this task, low-ECF participants' behavioral decisions seemed slightly slower than those of high-ECF participants. In light of these results, the authors speculate that a social informationprocessing problem may mediate the ECF aggression relationship rather than altered impulsivity per se.

Personality and aggressive behavior under provoking and neutral conditions: A meta-analytic review.

“…Then the coders and B. Ann 5 Studies that looked at personality variables hypothesized to decrease aggressive behavior were excluded from the present analysis. These included anxiety (Bjork et al, 1997;Dengerink, 1971;Dorsky & Taylor, 1972;Wilkinson, 1985), depression (Bjork et al, 1997), empathy and perspective taking (Giancola, 2003;Perugini & Gallucci, 2001; Richardson, Hammock, Smith, Gardner, & Signo, 1984;Strayer & Roberts, 2004), executive functioning (Hoaken, Shaughnessy, & Pihl, 2003;Santor, Ingram, & Kusumakar, 2003), intelligence (Giancola & Zeichner, 1994), nonviolence (Sen, 1986), reflection (Irwin & Gross, 1995), selfconsciousness (Spivey & Prentice-Dunn, 1990), and social integration and ascendancy (Boyatzis, 1975). Also, studies that looked at individual differences hypothesized to increase aggressive behavior but that yielded only one effect size were excluded from analyses.…”

Influence of Impulsivity-Reflexivity when Testing Dynamic Spatial Ability: Sex and g Differences

“…However, researches on impulsivity as a personality trait, have frequently reported that men are more impulsive than women (Bettencourt & Millar, 1996;Waldeck & Miller, 1997), although other works have not found these relations (Hoaken, Shaughnessy, & Pihl, 2003;Smith, Waterman, & Ward, 2006). In any case, most of these studies have used questionnaires, and the correlation between objective and subjective measures of impulsivity has not yet been sufficiently established (Enticott, Ogloff, & Bradshaw, 2006;Lane, Cherek, Rhodes, Pietras, & Tcheremissine, 2003;Malle & Neubauer, 1990;Phillips & Rabbitt, 1995).…”

A formal cognitive model of the go/no-go discrimination task: Evaluation and implications.

“…Both the Iowa Gambling Task and the go/no-go discrimination task (see, e.g., Hoaken, Shaughnessy, & Pihl, 2003) are often used as putative measures of prefrontal circuitry, which modulates behavioral inhibition. In the Iowa Gambling Task, a high performance level is achieved by rejecting (i.e., not selecting) alternatives that produce high gains and even higher losses and instead selecting alternatives with inferior gains but smaller losses.…”