Hostility

BackgroundHostility is associated with a significantly increased risk of age-related disease and mortality, yet the pathophysiological mechanisms involved remain unclear. Here we investigated the hypothesis that hostility might impact health by promoting cellular aging.MethodsWe tested the relationship between cynical hostility and two known markers of cellular aging, leukocyte telomere length (TL) and leukocyte telomerase activity (TA), in 434 men and women from the Whitehall II cohort.ResultsHigh-hostile men had significantly shorter leukocyte TL than their low-hostile counterparts. They also had elevated leukocyte TA, with a significantly increased likelihood of having both short TL and high TA, compared with low-hostile individuals.ConclusionsBecause telomerase is known to counteract telomere shortening by synthesizing telomeric DNA repeats, particularly in the context of shortened telomeres, heightened TA might represent a compensatory response in high-hostile individuals. The relationship between hostility and disease is stronger in men than in women, and men generally have a shorter life expectancy than women. Our findings suggest that telomere attrition might represent a novel mechanism mediating the detrimental effects of hostility on men's health.

BackgroundA growing body of research suggests that childhood adversities are associated with later psychosis, broadly defined. However, there remain several gaps and unanswered questions. Most studies are of low-level psychotic experiences and findings cannot necessarily be extrapolated to psychotic disorders. Further, few studies have examined the effects of more fine-grained dimensions of adversity such as type, timing and severity.AimsUsing detailed data from the Childhood Adversity and Psychosis (CAPsy) study, we sought to address these gaps and examine in detail associations between a range of childhood adversities and psychotic disorder.MethodCAPsy is population-based first-episode psychosis case-control study in the UK. In a sample of 374 cases and 301 controls, we collected extensive data on childhood adversities, in particular household discord, various forms of abuse and bullying, and putative confounders, including family history of psychotic disorder, using validated, semi-structured instruments.ResultsWe found strong evidence that all forms of childhood adversity were associated with around a two- to fourfold increased odds of psychotic disorder and that exposure to multiple adversities was associated with a linear increase in odds. We further found that severe forms of adversity, i.e. involving threat, hostility and violence, were most strongly associated with increased odds of disorder. More tentatively, we found that some adversities (e.g. bullying, sexual abuse) were more strongly associated with psychotic disorder if first occurrence was in adolescence.ConclusionsOur findings extend previous research on childhood adversity and suggest a degree of specificity for severe adversities involving threat, hostility and violence.

Aggressive manifestations and their consequences are a major issue of mankind, highlighting the need for understanding the contributory factors. Still, aggression-related genetic analyses have so far mainly been conducted on small population subsets such as individuals suffering from a certain psychiatric disorder or a narrow-range age cohort, but no data on the general population is yet available. In the present study, our aim was to identify polymorphisms in genes affecting neurobiological processes that might explain some of the inter-individual variation between aggression levels in the non-clinical Caucasian adult population. 55 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) were simultaneously determined in 887 subjects who also filled out the self-report Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ). Single marker association analyses between genotypes and aggression scores indicated a significant role of rs7322347 located in the HTR2A gene encoding serotonin receptor 2a following Bonferroni correction for multiple testing (p = 0.0007) both for males and females. Taking the four BPAQ subscales individually, scores for Hostility, Anger and Physical Aggression showed significant association with rs7322347 T allele in themselves, while no association was found with Verbal Aggression. Of the subscales, relationship with rs7322347 was strongest in the case of Hostility, where statistical significance virtually equaled that observed with the whole BPAQ. In conclusion, this is the first study to our knowledge analyzing SNPs in a wide variety of genes in terms of aggression in a large sample-size non-clinical adult population, also describing a novel candidate polymorphism as predisposal to aggressive traits.

Facial emotion recognition (FER) biases refer to systematic tendencies to recognize specific emotions when processing facial expressions. In youths with conduct disorder (CD), who are characterized by highly impairing antisocial behavior, research on FER biases has focused on hostile attribution biases. This work has shown that youths with CD perceive ambiguous social cues as angry. However, youths with CD may not only show biases towards anger, which is why we investigated FER biases in youths with CD towards the six basic emotions. Within the European FemNAT-CD study, we analyzed data from 610 youths with CD (60% female) and 818 typically developing controls (TDCs; 68% female), aged 9 to 18 years (M = 14.1, SD = 2.41 years). FER biases were assessed using the Emotion Hexagon Task by showing morphed emotional expressions and asking participants to choose the predominant emotion. Biases were calculated as tendency towards an emotion shown at 0%, 10%, 30%, or 50% intensity. Our findings from hierarchical linear modelling indicate that youths with CD exhibited stronger FER biases than TDCs across all emotions, meaning that they misclassified each emotion more often. However, this difference varied by intensity, with youths with CD displaying weaker biases at higher intensity levels and a smaller increase in bias with increasing intensity level. Our findings indicate that youths with CD not only show a hostile attribution bias but rather misclassify emotions as predominant when they are present at low intensity, regardless of type of emotion.