Aggression differentially modulates neural correlates of social intention attribution to benevolent, tickling and taunting laughter: An fMRI study in children and adolescents

ABSTRACT

Human laughter is a powerful means of communicating social intention, ranging from welcoming and friendly to hostile and ridiculing. To be communicated accurately, the recipient must correctly identify the laugher’s underlying social intention. Regular misattribution of the social intention of others has been associated with maladaptive psychosocial development, in particular with aggressive behavior. We investigated the relationship between self-reported aggressive behavior and the neural correlates of social intention attributions to different audiovisual laughter types in 50 healthy children and adolescents (29 female, 10–18 years, M 15.5, SD 2.2) using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Trial-by-trial associations of neural response and behavioral attributions were distinctly modulated by aggression for benevolent versus taunting and tickling laughter. With increasing aggression, hostile misattributions of benevolent laughter were associated with decreased dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior insular cortex activation. In contrast, hostile attributions of taunting and tickling laughter were associated with increased superior frontal, superior temporal, medial prefrontal, supplementary motor, and anterior and mid-cingulate cortex activation. We argue that aggression may be associated with down-regulated emotional saliency of benevolent laughter, whereas up-regulated neural responses to taunting laughter may underlie a heightened sensitivity to hostility or acceptance of taunting behavior in more aggressive individuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Social intention
• hostile attribution
• aggression
• laughter perception
• social saliency network

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration (grant agreement no 602407, FemNAT-CD). The authors would also like to thank Anna Mehl for collecting the data included in the supplementary material and the anonymous reviewers whose comments greatly improved the structure and clarity of this manuscript.

Author Contributions

AM: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software, visualization, writing - original draft; BK, DW: conceptualization, formal analysis, methodology, software, supervision, validation, writing - review & editing; KA, AB: investigation, writing - review & editing; CF: funding acquisition, project administration, resources, supervision, writing - review & editing; CS: supervision, writing - review & editing.

Disclosure of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Seventh Framework Programme [602407].