Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 69, Issue 12, 15 June 2011, Pages 1153-1159
Biological Psychiatry

Review
Corticolimbic Function in Impulsive Aggressive Behavior

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.02.032Get rights and content

Building on animal and human lesion evidence, neuroimaging studies are increasingly identifying abnormalities in corticolimbic circuits mediating aggressive behavior. This review focuses on three neural systems involved in impulsive/reactive aggression: 1) subcortical neural systems that support the production of aggressive impulses; 2) decision-making circuits and social-emotional information processing circuits that evaluate the consequences of aggressing or not aggressing; and 3) frontoparietal regions that are involved in regulating emotions and impulsive motivational urges. We review psychiatric disorders, including borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder, characterized by elevated reactive aggression, focusing on abnormalities in these three neural systems.

Section snippets

Neural Systems Underlying Experience of Aggressive Impulses

Aggressive behaviors can be evolutionarily adaptive, for example, in the context of competition for food, resources, or mates. Animal studies have identified a number of midbrain and hypothalamic structures that are associated with aggressive responding, including the medial preoptic area, lateral septum, anterior and ventromedial hypothalamus, periaqueductal gray, and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (2).

The amygdala has also been implicated in the initiation and expression of aggression (2

Neural Systems Underlying Decision Making

Decision making involves a cluster of related processes that allow a person to select actions that promote achievement of his or her goals or overall interests. Functions that are involved in decision making include 1) representation of the decision problem; 2) action selection based on evaluation of the candidate actions and associated potential outcomes or downstream consequences; and 3) monitoring of outcomes and learning based on feedback (23, 24, 25). A person impaired with respect to any

Neural Systems Subserving the Regulation of Emotion

Emotion regulation refers to processes that alter the duration, content, intensity, and quality of emotional experience based on the current situational context to more effectively respond to situational needs and pursue long-term goals (50, 51). Impulsive aggression has been conceptualized as being intimately tied to situational provocation and the experience of strong emotions such as outbursts of anger (1). Thus, abnormalities in emotion regulation are likely to play an important role in

Corticolimbic Function in Aggression-Related Psychiatric Disorders

Aggression is a serious problem in clinical populations. Intermittent explosive disorder (IED) is the only DSM-IV disorder for which aggression is the cardinal symptom. However, there are many other psychiatric disorders for which aggression is prominent among the diagnostic criteria, most notably borderline personality disorder (BPD), antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), and conduct disorder. Abnormalities in corticolimbic functioning may contribute to aggression in these populations.

Caveats and Limitations

There are a number of caveats concerning the findings reported in this review. First, findings are reviewed from animal and human studies that used different investigative methods and different sample sizes and were overall of different methodological quality. Generalizations were made regarding trends emerging from these studies, but these are qualitative interpretations and future work should seek to quantitatively test specific claims (e.g., using meta-analytic methods) wherever appropriate.

Conclusions

Convergent evidence indicates that impulsive aggression is mediated by subcortical circuits including brainstem regions and amygdala that subserve the production of aggressive impulses, corticolimbic circuits including OMPFC and rostral ACC that subserve decision making and social-emotional information processing, and frontoparietal regions that are involved in regulating emotions and impulsive motivational urges (Figure 1). Building on animal and human lesion evidence, neuroimaging studies are

References (101)

  • H. Anckarsäter et al.

    Persistent regional frontotemporal hypoactivity in violent offenders at follow-up

    Psychiatry Res

    (2007)
  • A. Bechara et al.

    Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex

    Cognition

    (1994)
  • K.L. Phan et al.

    Functional neuroanatomy of emotion: A meta-analysis of emotion activation studies in PET and fMRI

    Neuroimage

    (2002)
  • J. Hornak et al.

    Face and voice expression identification in patients with emotional and behavioural changes following ventral frontal lobe damage

    Neuropsychologia

    (1996)
  • J.A. King et al.

    Doing the right thing: A common neural circuit for appropriate violent or compassionate behavior

    Neuroimage

    (2006)
  • T.D. Wager et al.

    Prefrontal-subcortical pathways mediating successful emotion regulation

    Neuron

    (2008)
  • D.M. Marsh et al.

    Laboratory-measured aggressive behavior of women: Acute tryptophan depletion and augmentation

    Neuropsychopharmacology

    (2002)
  • E. Emanuele et al.

    Relationship between platelet serotonin content and rejections of unfair offers in the ultimatum game

    Neurosci Lett

    (2008)
  • A.E. Skodol et al.

    The borderline diagnosis II: Biology, genetics, and clinical course

    Biol Psychiatry

    (2002)
  • I.K. Lyoo et al.

    A brain MRI study in subjects with borderline personality disorder

    J Affect Disord

    (1998)
  • L. Tebartz van Elst et al.

    Frontolimbic brain abnormalities in patients with borderline personality disorder: A volumetric magnetic resonance imaging study

    Biol Psychiatry

    (2003)
  • N. Rüsch et al.

    A voxel-based morphometric MRI study in female patients with borderline personality disorder

    Neuroimage

    (2003)
  • C. Schmahl et al.

    Neuroimaging in borderline personality disorder

    J Psychiatr Res

    (2006)
  • S.C. Herpertz et al.

    Evidence of abnormal amygdala functioning in borderline personality disorder: A functional MRI study

    Biol Psychiatry

    (2001)
  • N.H. Donegan et al.

    Amygdala hyperreactivity in borderline personality disorder: Implications for emotional dysregulation

    Biol Psychiatry

    (2003)
  • L.J. Siever et al.

    d,l-fenfluramine response in impulsive personality disorder assessed with [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography

    Neuropsychopharmacology

    (1999)
  • E.F. Coccaro et al.

    Amygdala and orbitofrontal reactivity to social threat in individuals with impulsive aggression

    Biol Psychiatry

    (2007)
  • M.P. Laakso et al.

    Psychopathy and the posterior hippocampus

    Behav Brain Res

    (2001)
  • A. Raine et al.

    Hippocampal structural asymmetry in unsuccessful psychopaths

    Biol Psychiatry

    (2004)
  • M.P. Laakso et al.

    A volumetric MRI study of the hippocampus in type 1 and 2 alcoholism

    Behav Brain Res

    (2000)
  • K.A. Kiehl et al.

    Limbic abnormalities in affective processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging

    Biol Psychiatry

    (2001)
  • R. Veit et al.

    Brain circuits involved in emotional learning in antisocial behavior and social phobia in humans

    Neurosci Lett

    (2002)
  • R.J. Nelson et al.

    Neural mechanisms of aggression

    Nat Rev Neurosci

    (2007)
  • R.J. Davidson et al.

    Dysfunction in the neural circuitry of emotion regulation--a possible prelude to violence

    Science

    (2000)
  • D.G. Amaral

    The amygdala, social behavior, and danger detection

    Ann N Y Acad Sci

    (2003)
  • S.W. Newman

    The medial extended amygdala in male reproductive behaviorA node in the mammalian social behavior network

    Ann N Y Acad Sci

    (1999)
  • J.E. LeDoux

    Emotion circuits in the brain

    Annu Rev Neurosci

    (2000)
  • S. Maren

    Neurobiology of Pavlovian fear conditioning

    Annu Rev Neurosci

    (2001)
  • M. Davis et al.

    The amygdala: Vigilance and emotion

    Mol Psychiatry

    (2001)
  • J. Debiec

    Peptides of love and fear: Vasopressin and oxytocin modulate the integration of information in the amygdala

    Bioessays

    (2005)
  • D. Huber et al.

    Vasopressin and oxytocin excite distinct neuronal populations in the central amygdala

    Science

    (2005)
  • D.G. Amaral et al.

    Amygdalo-cortical projections in the monkey (Macaca fascicularis)

    J Comp Neurol

    (1984)
  • A. Izquierdo et al.

    Comparison of the effects of bilateral orbital prefrontal cortex lesions and amygdala lesions on emotional responses in rhesus monkeys

    J Neurosci

    (2005)
  • H. Kluver et al.

    Preliminary analysis of functions of the temporal lobes in monkeys

    (1939)

    J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci

    (1997)
  • V. Mark et al.

    Deep temporal lobe stimulation and destructive lesions in episodically violent temporal lobe epileptics

  • H. Narabayashi et al.

    Stereotaxic amygdalotomy for behavior disorders

    Arch Neurol

    (1963)
  • G.P. Lee et al.

    Clinical and physiological effects of stereotaxic bilateral amygdalotomy for intractable aggression

    J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci

    (1998)
  • J.L. Bufkin et al.

    Neuroimaging studies of aggressive and violent behavior: Current findings and implications for criminology and criminal justice

    Trauma Violence Abuse

    (2005)
  • A. Rangel et al.

    A framework for studying the neurobiology of value-based decision making

    Nat Rev Neurosci

    (2008)
  • L.K. Fellows

    The cognitive neuroscience of human decision making: A review and conceptual framework

    Behav Cogn Neurosci Rev

    (2004)
  • Cited by (177)

    • Burned agricultural biomass, air pollution and crime

      2023, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
    • Behavioral neuroscience of aggression

      2021, Encyclopedia of Behavioral Neuroscience: Second Edition
    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Authors EFC and CSS contributed equally to this work.

    View full text