Virtual Reality for Aggression Assessment: The Development and Preliminary Results of Two Virtual Reality Tasks to Assess Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Males.

Validly measuring aggression is challenging because self-reports are plagued with biased answer tendencies and behavioral measures with ethical concerns and low ecological validity. The current study, therefore, introduces a novel virtual reality (VR) aggression assessment tool, differentially assessing reactive and proactive aggression. Two VR tasks were developed, one in an alley environment (N = 24, all male, Mage = 23.88, 83.3% students) and an improved second one in a bar (N = 50, all male, Mage = 22.54, 90% students). In this bar VR task, participants were randomly assigned to either the reactive condition where they were triggered by a cheating and insulting dart-player or to the proactive condition where they could earn extra money by aggressing. Participants' level of self-reported aggression and psychopathy was assessed, after which they engaged in either the reactive or proactive VR task. Changes in affect and blood pressure were also measured. Aggression in the reactive VR task was evidenced to mostly display convergent validity because it positively correlated with self-reported aggression and total and fearless dominance factor scores of psychopathy, and there was a trend relationship with increased systolic blood pressure. The validity of the proactive aggression variant of our VR bar paradigm received less support, and needs more refinement. It can be concluded that VR is a potentially promising tool to experimentally induce and assess (reactive) aggression, which has the potential to provide aggression researchers and clinicians with a realistic and modifiable aggression assessment environment.

Cognitive predictors of reactive and proactive aggression in a forensic sample: A comparison with a non-clinical sample.

This study aimed at examining cognitive predictors of reactive and proactive aggression in a forensic-psychiatric (n = 80) and a non-clinical sample (n = 98; Brugman et al., 2015). Three different cognitive predictors were incorporated: (1) attentional bias towards aggressive stimuli (measured with Emotional Stroop task) and towards angry faces (measured with a visual search task); (2) interpretation biases (measured with Aggressive Interpretative Bias Task (AIBT) and a vignette task), and (3) implicit self-aggression association (measured with a Single-Target Implicit Association Task). To measure aggression, the Reactive-Proactive Aggression Questionnaire (RPQ) and the Taylor Aggression Paradigm (TAP) were used. An automatic self-aggression association positively predicted proactive aggressive behavior on the TAP in both samples. Furthermore, this self-aggression association predicted, increased self-reported proactive aggression (RPQ) in the forensic sample only. Pain, injury, and danger interpretations reported on the vignettes, negatively predicted self-reported proactive aggression in both samples. A stronger aggressive interpretation bias on the AIBT predicted more reactive aggressive behavior (TAP) in the non-clinical sample only. Taken together, findings show both common and distinct mechanisms in reactively vs. proactively driven aggressive behavior.

Affective traits of psychopathy are linked to white-matter abnormalities in impulsive male offenders.

OBJECTIVE: Psychopathy is a personality disorder typified by lack of empathy and impulsive antisocial behavior. Psychopathic traits may partly relate to disrupted connections between brain regions. The aim of the present study was to link abnormalities in microstructural integrity of white-matter tracts to the severity of different psychopathic traits in 15 male offenders with impulse control problems and 10 without impulse control problems. METHOD: Psychopathic traits were assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist-revised (PCL-R). Diffusion-weighted MRI was used to examine white-matter tracts. Fractional anisotropy (FA), an index of white-matter integrity, was calculated for each voxel. Clusters of voxels showing a significant relationship with psychopathy severity were submitted to probabilistic tractography. RESULTS: No significant correlations between psychopathy severity and FA were present in the whole group of impulsive and nonimpulsive offenders. In impulsive offenders, interpersonal-affective traits (PCL-R Factor 1) were negatively correlated with FA in the anterior and posterior temporal lobe and orbitofrontal area. Further analyses indicated that elevated affective traits (PCL-R Facet 2) were specifically related to reduced FA in the right temporal lobe. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that white-matter abnormalities in temporal and frontotemporal tracts may be linked to the interpersonal-affective deficits of psychopathy in offenders with relatively severe impulse control problems. Our study offers novel insights into the relationships between the four facets of psychopathy and disrupted structural connectivity, and may provide new leads for further characterization of different subtypes of antisocial populations. (PsycINFO Database Record

Did I say that word or did you? Executive dysfunctions in schizophrenic patients affect memory efficiency, but not source attributions.

INTRODUCTION: Schizophrenic patients have difficulties in recognising previously presented verbal information and identifying its sources. The antecedents of these recognition and source misattributions are, however, largely unknown. The current study examined to what extent schizophrenic patients' lack of memory efficiency, their memory errors, and their source misattributions are related to neurocognitive deficits (i.e., executive dysfunctions). METHODS: 23 schizophrenic patients and 20 healthy controls were administered an adapted version of the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task from which parameters of memory efficiency, memory errors, source misattributions, and two-high threshold measures were derived. Furthermore, two neurocognitive tasks tapping executive functions were administered: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) and the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS). Using multiple linear regression analyses, we examined whether these neurocognitive measures predicted various memory parameters. RESULTS: Patients with schizophrenia showed poorer memory efficiency and were more prone to make internal-external source misattributions with high confidence. However, they did not more often falsely recognise critical lure words than controls. Executive dysfunctions predicted memory efficiency, but not source misattribution performance. CONCLUSION: Our findings provide further evidence that schizophrenic patients' memory impairments are intimately related to fundamental neurocognitive deficits.