Aggressive individuals tend to process social information in a hostile manner (i.e. hostility bias).. Hostility biases are one of the key cognitive drivers of aggression. Such cognitive biases are believed to have a profound influence on decision-making, and drastically increase the likelihood of engaging in aggressive and violent acts. Hence, it contributes to a large societal problem as aggression is regarded as burden to society because of the enormous health, social and economic consequences. However, hostility biases are not effectively targeted in treatment because fundamental knowledge is lacking on why aggressive individuals interpret social information as hostile. We propose a novel multimodal approach to systematically study the biological and cognitive processes driving hostility biases in a population of severely aggressive individuals: forensic psychiatric patients. Our approach will foster the understanding of aggression at the level of its underlying causes, and in the long run will contribute to developing more targeted and effective interventions.
