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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Neural Mechanisms Of The Rejection-Aggression Link, David S. Chester, Donald R. Lynam, Richard Milich, C. Nathan Dewall
Neural Mechanisms Of The Rejection-Aggression Link, David S. Chester, Donald R. Lynam, Richard Milich, C. Nathan Dewall
Psychology Faculty Publications
Social rejection is a painful event that often increases aggression. However, the neural mechanisms of this rejection–aggression link remain unclear. A potential clue may be that rejected people often recruit the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex’s (VLPFC) self-regulatory processes to manage the pain of rejection. Using functional MRI, we replicated previous links between rejection and activity in the brain’s mentalizing network, social pain network and VLPFC. VLPFC recruitment during rejection was associated with greater activity in the brain’s reward network (i.e. the ventral striatum) when individuals were given an opportunity to retaliate. This retaliation-related striatal response was associated with greater levels of …
Physical Aggressiveness And Gray Matter Deficits In Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex, David S. Chester, Donald R. Lynam, Richard Milich, C. Nathan Dewall
Physical Aggressiveness And Gray Matter Deficits In Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex, David S. Chester, Donald R. Lynam, Richard Milich, C. Nathan Dewall
Psychology Faculty Publications
What causes individuals to hurt others? Since the famous case of Phineas Gage, lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) have been reliably linked to physically aggressive behavior. However, it is unclear whether naturally-occurring deficits in VMPFC, among normal individuals, might have widespread consequences for aggression. Using voxel based morphometry, we regressed gray matter density from the brains of 138 normal female and male adults onto their dispositional levels of physical aggression, verbal aggression, and sex, simultaneously. Physical, but not verbal, aggression was associated with reduced gray matter volume in the VMPFC and to a lesser extent, frontopolar cortex. Participants …