Electroencephalography Mood Disorders

Building on prior research, which has suggested a rela-tionship between aggression and left frontal activity, our study tested the hypothesis that proneness to impulsive aggression would be related to relative left frontal overacti-vation. EEG one-hertz resting alpha power frontal asym-metry was examined in 65 pediatric male psychiatric patients with a historj of impulsive aggression and comor-bid mood and disruptive behavior disorders. The strongest finding, which emerged from this analy-sis, was a finding of relative increases in left frontal activi-ty compared with right frontal activity. The results also indi-cated that greater left frontal activity correlated positively with the severity of psychiatric disturbance. These findings suggest that relative increases in left frontal activity may be related to a locus of neurophysiological disruption associ-ated with psychopathology characterized by behavioral and affective disinhibition. Results are discussed within a model of behavioral inhibition system-behavioral activation system theory