Social cognition in Intermittent Explosive Disorder and aggression

Abstract

Social-emotional information processing (SEIP) was assessed in individuals with current DSM-5 Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED: n = 100) and in healthy (n = 100) and psychiatric (n = 100) controls using a recently developed and validated self-rated questionnaire. SEIP vignettes depicted both direct aggressive and relationally aggressive scenarios of a socially ambiguous nature and were followed by questions assessing subjects' reactions and judgments about the vignettes. IED subjects differed from both healthy and psychiatric controls in all SEIP components. While hostile attribution was highly related to history of aggression, it was also directly correlated with negative emotional response. Further analysis revealed that this component, as well as response valuation and response efficiency, rather than hostile attribution, best explained history of aggressive behavior. A reformulated SEIP model, including self-reported history of childhood trauma, found that negative emotional response and response efficiency were the critical correlates for history of aggressive behavior. Psychosocial interventions of aggressive behavior in IED subjects may do well to include elements that work to reduce the emotional response to social threat and that work to restructure social cognition so that the tendency towards overt, or relationally, aggressive responding is reduced.

Keywords: Aggression; Hostile attribution; Negative emotion; Social emotional information processing.

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest statement: Dr. Coccaro reports being on the Scientific Advisory Board of Azevan Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and being a current recipient of a grant award from the NIMH. Dr. Lee reports being a past recipient of a research grant from Azevan Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Drs. Fanning and Keedy report no conflicts of interest regarding this work.

Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Figures

Fig. 1

Marginal means (±SEM) from MANCOVA for Hostile Attribution (HA), Benign Attribution (BA), Instrumental Attribution (IA), and Negative Emotional Response (NER) scores. * Indicates post hoc p

Fig. 2

Marginal means (±SEM) from MANCOVA for Socially Appropriate (APP) compared with Aggressive (AGG) responses for Mean RED score (Mean RED), Response Valuation (R-Value), Outcome Expectancy (O-Exp), Response Efficacy (R-Eff) and Response Enactment (R-Enact) scores. * Indicates post-hoc p