Current data on the nature of aggressive individuals’ difficulties in reappraising their spontaneous hostile intent attribution are contradictory: they are impulsive and don’t seek out for additional nonhostile cues vs. they pay attention to nonhostile cues but fail to integrate them into their hostile schemas. To better understand the nature of aggressive people’s reappraisal difficulties, we developed an event-related brain potential (ERP) protocol inspired by Zaki’s (2013) cue integration model. The objective of this study was to track the neural activity associated with the violation of expectations about hostile vs. nonhostile intentions in aggressive and nonaggressive individuals when facing conflicting contextual and behavioral cues in a given social situation. We hypothesized that aggressive individuals do not integrate nonhostile contextual information and, therefore, overestimate the behavioral hostile cues. Our sample consisted of women from the community (n=23) and a prison (n=20). Taken together, the results suggest that aggressive individuals demonstrate an impulsivity in their decision-making about other people’s intentions. This would be the case, not because they fail to seek out mitigating information, but rather because they fail to complete the inferential processes about the hostile and nonhostile information before making a judgement about the other’s intent. In contrast with aggressive individuals, non-aggressive people would be able to make a decision when facing conflicting information about the other’s mental state by privileging contextual cues in order to attenuate their attribution of hostile intention based on the behavior of others.

Learning, and detection of regularities allows us to make predictions about our environment and process stimuli more efficiently. Using EEG, we found an electrophysiological signature linked to how the brain uses and interprets auditory information in the time domain. We used sequences of five tones with different pitches, with one of three distinct temporal regularities, using a short-long-short-long, long-short-long-short, or isochronous ISI pattern. They were designed so the second tone carried temporal-sequence information, by being presented after a short, medium, or long ISI, allowing recognition of the pattern. Participants heard two tone sequences with the same temporal regularity and had to indicate if the tone pitches were identical. In one experiment, the three types of regularities were randomly intermixed, whereas they were blocked in a control experiment. A frontal and frontocentral positivity increased for the first set of the first experiment (when temporal pattern was not previously known), compared to that same set in the control experiment (pattern known), starting around the earliest time the second tone could be presented, and peaking shortly after actual tone onset. Although these temporal patterns were task irrelevant, and most participants were unaware of them when asked, our results suggest the brain disambiguates its variable environment based on the earliest available information, and that it does so rapidly, pre-attentively, and automatically.