Abstract
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 retaliatory aggression. Dispositionally aggressive individuals exhibited less functional connectivity between the ventral striatum and the right VLPFC during aggression. This connectivity exerted a suppressing effect on dispositionally aggressive individuals’ greater aggressive responses to rejection. These results help explain how the pain of rejection and reward of revenge motivate rejected people to behave aggressively.
Keywords
aggression, social rejection, reward, frontostriatal, fMRI
Date of this Version
5-1-2018
Recommended Citation
Chester, David S.; Lynam, Donald R.; Milich, Richard; and DeWall, C. Nathan, "Neural mechanisms of the rejection-aggression link" (2018). Department of Psychological Sciences Faculty Publications. Paper 86.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/psychpubs/86
Comments
This is the Publisher PDF of David S Chester, Donald R Lynam, Richard Milich, C Nathan DeWall (2024) Neural mechanisms of the rejection–aggression link, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 13 (5): 501–512. Published CC-BY-NC by Oxford, it is also available at DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsy025.