Abstract
Personality describes persistent human behavioral responses to broad classes of environmental stimuli. Investigating how personality traits are reflected in the brain's functional architecture is challenging, in part due to the difficulty of designing appropriate task probes. Resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) can detect intrinsic activation patterns without relying on any specific task. Here we use RSFC to investigate the neural correlates of the five-factor personality domains. Based on seed regions placed within two cognitive and affective ‘hubs’ in the brain—the anterior cingulate and precuneus—each domain of personality predicted RSFC with a unique pattern of brain regions. These patterns corresponded with functional subdivisions responsible for cognitive and affective processing such as motivation, empathy and future-oriented thinking. Neuroticism and Extraversion, the two most widely studied of the five constructs, predicted connectivity between seed regions and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and lateral paralimbic regions, respectively. These areas are associated with emotional regulation, self-evaluation and reward, consistent with the trait qualities. Personality traits were mostly associated with functional connections that were inconsistently present across participants. This suggests that although a fundamental, core functional architecture is preserved across individuals, variable connections outside of that core encompass the inter-individual differences in personality that motivate diverse responses.
Highlights
Despite the varied and dynamic nature of human environments, the patterns of behavior and cognition that constitute personality tend to be enduring and broadly predictable
The majority of regions whose Resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) seeds (Figure 1) was predicted by personality were located in the medial prefrontal cortex, paracingulate gyrus and anterior/central precuneus (Figures 3, 4 and 5)
Regions whose RSFC with ACC seeds was invariantly positive were located at long distances from the seed region of interest or were located in distinct functional areas
Summary
Despite the varied and dynamic nature of human environments, the patterns of behavior and cognition that constitute personality tend to be enduring and broadly predictable. The predominant approach to dimensionalizing personality traits [2,3] assesses five domains: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness [4,5]. Studies of the neurobiological substrates of personality traits have largely focused on the most long-standing domains: Neuroticism and Extraversion [2,6]. The unevenness of coverage of the five principal personality domains is partly ascribable to the constraints inherent in task-based imaging approaches, which require effective cognitive, behavioral or emotional probes that target specific psychological constructs. Taskbased studies are limited in the breadth of neural systems and cognitive-behavioral constructs that can be effectively probed in a given experiment. Investigating the relationship between personality and brain structure is one method for simultaneously delineating brain systems potentially relevant to all five trait domains [7], but interpretations of structure-behavior relationships remain ambiguous
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