From words to action: Implicit attention to antisocial semantic cues predicts aggression and amygdala reactivity to angry faces in healthy young women

Implicit measures of aggressiveness are able to circumvent response biases that plague self-reports, but it is unclear how they link to neural activation during aggressive interactions and to aggression-related endocrine function. Here, we tested whether an implicit attentional bias toward antisocial semantic information was associated with endogenous testosterone (T) and cortisol (C) levels, as well as with aggressive behavior and amygdala reactivity to angry faces in a separate competitive paradigm. On Day one, participants (39 healthy young women) completed an emotional word Stroop task in which they had to indicate the font color of antisocial, prosocial, or neutral words. On Day two, we measured subjects' brain activity during a competitive reaction time task in which the female opponent displayed angry or neutral facial expressions at the start of each trial and provoked participants with increasingly strong sound blasts. T and C were measured in saliva during a regular weekday as well as before and after scanning. We previously showed that aggression was associated with enhanced amygdala reactivity to angry faces in this sample. The present analyses revealed that subjects were slower to identify the font color of antisocial relative to neutral words, and that this attentional bias predicted higher aggression. T and C were uncorrelated with Stroop scores. Crucially, the relationship between implicit attention to antisocial words and aggression was mediated by amygdala reactivity to angry faces. Our data indicate that a tendency to dwell on implicit hostile cues reflects enhanced responsivity to overt anger displays.