Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Introduction  The autonomic nerve activity pattern of antisocial spectrum behavior, including aggression, psychopathy, and conduct problems, has been examined in a number of studies over the past decades, especially in heart rate (HR) and skin conductance (SC). The findings indicated that aggression reliably though modestly associated with HR and SC in many cases. Low resting and task skin conductance were associated with conduct problems. Low resting HR and high HR reactivity were associated with aggression and conduct problems. However, the patterns of autonomic nervous activity are influenced by emotional valence of stimuli. Also aggression may be physical or relational. This study was conducted to explore the relations between physical aggression and autonomic activity, the different characteristics of autonomic activity among the students with and withoug physical aggressive behavior under conditions of different emotional valence of stimuli.

Method  Sixty-one students attended the experiment of this study, including 31 students with physical aggressive behavior and 30 normal students. Physiological responses, including the finger temperature, skin conductance, R-R interval, heart rate, and finger pulse, were recorded using Biopac100PW under resting condition and condition of different emotional stimuli. There were four emotional stimuli, three film clips eliciting disgust and fear, sadness, and happiness, and one language material eliciting anger. Acqknowledge 100PW and SPSS 11.5 were used to analyze data.

Results  (1) There was a significant difference between students with physical aggressive behavior and normal students on the baseline of physiological activation such as finger temperature, finger pulse rate, heart rate, and R-R interval. Finger temperature, finger pulse rate and heart rate of students with physical aggressive behavior were lower than those of normal students and their R-R interval was longer than those of normal students. (2) In condition elicited anger, students with physical aggressive behavior reported higher level of anger experience than those of normal students. Significant difference of average changes in terms of R-R interval, heart rate existed between students with physical aggressive behavior and those of normal students when they read provocative and insulting language eliciting anger. The R-R interval, heart rate of students with physical aggressive behavior increased and those of normal students had no significant changes. (3) In condition eliciting disgust and fear, sadness, happiness, the skin conductance level of normal students changed more significantly than those of students with physical aggressive behavior.

Conclusion  The finding of this study showed that there were different patterns of autonomic activity between physical aggressive students and normal students. Autonomic activity of physical aggressive students is imbalance. They had higher HR under condition eliciting anger. So intervention of physical aggressive students needs to reshape their pattern of autonomic activity using biofeedback and other methods. It is also important to enhance their emotion-regulation competence.

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