Hostname: page-component-857557d7f7-8wkb5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-12-04T00:23:26.561Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Why not reduce reactive aggression too?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2025

Antonio Benítez-Burraco Open the ORCID record for Antonio Benítez-Burraco [Opens in a new window]
Antonio Benítez-Burraco*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish, Linguistics, and Theory of Literature (Linguistics), Faculty of Philology, University of Seville, Seville, Spain abenitez8@us.es
*
*Corresponding author.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Grooming is one strong mechanism allowing primate groups to grow larger and more cohesive, but a reduction in reactive aggression responses can be expected to have contributed to this trend too. There is indeed a partial overlap between the neurobiology of grooming and the neurobiology of reactive aggression.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 48 , 2025 , e165
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Benítez-Burraco, A., Lattanzi, W., & Murphy, E. (2016). Language impairments in ASD resulting from a failed domestication of the human brain. Frontiers in neuroscience, 10, 373. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2016.00373 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Benítez-Burraco, A., & Progovac, L. (2021). Language evolution: Examining the link between cross-modality and aggression through the lens of disorders. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 376(1824), 20200188. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0188 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Benítez-Burraco, A., Ferretti, F., & Progovac, L. (2021). Human self-domestication and the evolution of pragmatics. Cognitive science, 45(6), e12987. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12987 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chrousos, G. P., Renquist, D., Brandon, D., Eil, C., Pugeat, M., Vigersky, R., Cutler, G. B. Jr, Loriaux, D. L., & Lipsett, M. B. (1982). Glucocorticoid hormone resistance during primate evolution: Receptor-mediated mechanisms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 79(6), 2036–2040. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.79.6.2036 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clos, M., Bunzeck, N., & Sommer, T. (2019). Dopamine is a double-edged sword: Dopaminergic modulation enhances memory retrieval performance but impairs metacognition. Neuropsychopharmacology, 44(3), 555–563. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-018-0246-y CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ericsson, M., Fallahsharoudi, A., Bergquist, J., Kushnir, M. M., & Jensen, P. (2014). Domestication effects on behavioural and hormonal responses to acute stress in chickens. Physiology & behavior, 133, 161–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2014.05.024 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hare, B. (2017). Survival of the friendliest: Homo sapiens evolved via selection for prosociality. Annual review of psychology, 68, 155–186. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044201 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lischinsky, J. E., & Lin, D. (2020). Neural mechanisms of aggression across species. Nature neuroscience, 23(11), 1317–1328. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-00715-2 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Murphy, E., Hoshi, K., & Benítez-Burraco, A. (2022) Subcortical syntax: Reconsidering the neural dynamics of language. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 62, 101062. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101062 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Rourke, T., Martins, P. T., Asano, R., Tachibana, R. O., Okanoya, K., & Boeckx, C. (2021). Capturing the effects of domestication on vocal learning complexity: (Trends in Cognitive Sciences 25, 462-474; 2021). Trends in cognitive sciences, 25(8), 722. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.05.002 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Raghanti, M. A., Edler, M. K., Stephenson, A. R., Wilson, L. J., Hopkins, W. D., Ely, J. J., Erwin, J. M., Jacobs, B., Hof, P. R., & Sherwood, C. C. (2016). Human-specific increase of dopaminergic innervation in a striatal region associated with speech and language: A comparative analysis of the primate basal ganglia. The Journal of comparative neurology, 524(10), 2117–2129. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.23937 CrossRefGoogle Scholar