Social threat processing and emotional arousal : Associations between the Late Positive Potential and aggressive tendencies

Aggressive behaviour can be defined as actions that are believed and intended to cause harm to another individual that does not desire to be the target of such actions. Different situations can warrant aggressive behaviour, such as when an individual is posed with a threat. Aggressive behaviour is one of the ways individuals can deal with threats arising from their environments, and furthermore, aggressive behaviour can also be used to deal with social threats that arise from the interaction between two members of the same species. Aggressive behaviour is correlated with higher emotional arousal, and individuals that illustrate aggressive tendencies should be more sensitive to arousal when confronted with a social threat. This thesis acts upon this notion by hypothesizing that individuals who score higher on a tendency for aggression measurements should exhibit higher emotional arousal when exposed to a cue of social threat. Cues of social threats are thought to be induced by exposing the participant to either an angry face or a face with a high facial width to height ratio. The emotional response is measured with electroencephalography, more specifically looking at the late positive potential. No support for the hypothesis was found between high and low aggression groups. The facial width to height ratios proposed nature of being a cue of social threat becomes contested as the results were conflicting regarding the robustness of the facial width to height ratio’s effect. Even if there were no statistically significant differences found between the two groups, it might not be subject for dismissal as the sample population could be considered a low aggression population overall