Out of control: Evidence for anterior insula involvement in motor impulsivity and reactive aggression

Abstract

Inhibiting impulsive reactions while still defending one's vital resources is paramount to functional self-control and successful development in a social environment. However, this ability of successfully inhibiting, and thus controlling one's impulsivity, often fails, leading to consequences ranging from motor impulsivity to aggressive reactions following provocation. Although inhibitory failure represents the underlying mechanism, the neurocognition of social aggression and motor response inhibition have traditionally been investigated in separation. Here, we aimed to directly investigate and compare the neural mechanisms underlying the failure of inhibition across those different modalities of self-control. We used functional imaging to reveal the overlap in neural correlates between failed motor response inhibition (measured by a go/no-go task) and reactive aggression (measured by the Taylor aggression paradigm) in healthy males. The core overlap of neural correlates was located in the anterior insula, suggesting common anterior insula involvement in motor impulsivity as well as reactive aggression. This evidence regarding an overarching role of the anterior insula across different modalities of self-control enables an integrative perspective on insula function and a better integration of cognitive, social and emotional factors into a comprehensive model of impulsivity. Furthermore, it can eventually lead to a better understanding of clinical syndromes involving inhibitory deficits.

Influence of the cortical midline structures on moral emotion and motivation in moral decision-making

“…Second, activity in the CMS regions significantly moderates activity in other brain regions associated with moral emotion and motivation (e.g., midbrain including the ventral tegmental area, ventral striatum, insula, OFC [57][58][59][60][61]) while subjects are solving moral problems.…”

“…First, previous experiments have demonstrated that the PI is the core of the immediate processing of affective responses and the induction of subjective feelings [73,74], particularly negative emotions (e.g., pain and disgust) [73][74][75][76][77], that play fundamental roles in moral cognition [42,53]. Moreover, the AI is closely associated with the integration of cognition and emotion [78][79][80][81][82], conscious and interceptive awareness, monitoring of aroused emotional responses [28,83,84], and finally, the modulation of motivational force [60,61,85]. Given these previous works, the present study chooses the AI and PI as the regions of interest for the GCA.…”

Foresight beats hindsight: The neural correlates underlying motor preparation in the pro‐/anti‐cue paradigm

“…This activation was apparent in the overall contrast anti‐cues versus pro‐cues (Figure 4), and mirrored in the contrast map of anti‐cue trials with short cue‐target interval compared to pro‐cue trials with short cue‐target interval (Figure 6). Anterior insular activation has repeatedly been associated with response restraint and response cancellation (Dambacher et al., 2014a, 2014b, 2014c; Swick et al., 2011). It should be emphasized that the reported insular activation extended very prominently into the inferior frontal cortex, which is classically associated with motor response inhibition (Aron, Robbins, & Poldrack, 2004; Chambers et al., 2006, 2007).…”

“…This contrast also yielded more activity in right superior frontal gyrus during the short‐interval trials. This region was shown to be a core region involved in successful response inhibition and specifically action restraint (Aron et al., 2004; Dambacher et al., 2014a, 2014b; Swick et al., 2011). Research using noninvasive brain stimulation further emphasized the role of the right superior frontal gyrus in response restraint (Dambacher et al., 2014c).…”

Sex differences in impulsivity and brain volumes in methamphetamine users

“…The insula has been implicated in different modalities of self-control (Dambacher et al, 2014) and decision-making with risk-taking (Paulus et al, 2003;Xue et al, 2010), suggesting it plays a role in drug addiction (Naqvi et al, 2014). However, previous studies have shown mixed results as to whether drug addiction was associated with increased or decreased gray matter volume in the insula.…”