Punishment on Pause: Preliminary Evidence That Mindfulness Training Modifies Neural Responses in a Reactive Aggression Task
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience July 23, 2021 Hadley Rahrig, James M. Bjork, Camila Tirado et al. 17 citations
Reactive aggression, a hostile response to perceived threat, has been linked to emotion regulation failures. A pilot study compared two weeks of mindfulness training (MT) to active coping training (CT) in healthy adults, using fMRI during a retaliatory aggression task. The groups did not differ in aggression levels. However, MT participants showed greater ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity during punishment events, while CT participants showed greater dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) activity when deciding retaliation. The findings suggest mindfulness and cognitive control training may regulate aggression through different neural circuits at different stages of provocation.