Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Department of Neurology, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany.
Transl Psychiatry. 2023 Jun 10;13(1):197. doi: 10.1038/s41398-023-02497-0.
Individuals with hostile expectations (HEX) anticipate harm from seemingly neutral or ambiguous stimuli. However, it is unclear how HEX are acquired, and whether specific components of HEX learning can predict antisocial thought, conduct, and personality. In an online sample of healthy young individuals (n = 256, 69% women), we administered a virtual shooting task and applied computational modelling of behaviour to investigate HEX learning and its constellation of correlates. HEX acquisition was best explained by a hierarchical reinforcement learning mechanism. Crucially, we found that individuals with relatively higher self-reported aggressiveness and psychopathy developed stronger and less accurate hostile beliefs as well as larger prediction errors. Moreover, aggressive and psychopathic traits were associated with more temporally stable hostility representations. Our study thus shows that aggressiveness and psychopathy are linked with the acquisition of robust yet imprecise hostile beliefs through reinforcement learning.
具有敌意期望（HEX）的个体预期看似中性或模糊的刺激会带来伤害。然而，目前尚不清楚 HEX 是如何习得的，以及 HEX 学习的特定成分是否可以预测反社会思维、行为和个性。在一项针对健康年轻个体的在线样本中（n=256，69%为女性），我们进行了一项虚拟射击任务，并应用行为计算模型来研究 HEX 学习及其相关因素。HEX 的习得可以通过分层强化学习机制得到很好的解释。至关重要的是，我们发现，自我报告攻击性和精神病态程度较高的个体发展出更强但不那么准确的敌意信念以及更大的预测误差。此外，攻击性和精神病态特质与更具时间稳定性的敌意表现有关。因此，我们的研究表明，攻击性和精神病态通过强化学习与更强但不准确的敌意信念的习得有关。
