Abstract

"Personality is an abstraction used to explain consistency and coherency in an individual's pattern of affects, cognitions, desires and behaviors [ABCDs]" (Revelle, 2007, p. 37). But personality research currently provides more a taxonomy of patterns than theories of fundamental causes. Psychiatric disorders can be viewed as involving extremes of personality but are diagnosed via symptom patterns not biological causes. Such surface-level taxonomic description is necessary for science, but consistent predictive explanation requires causal theory. Personality constructs, and especially their clinical extremes, should predict variation in ABCD patterns, with parsimony requiring the lowest effective causal level of explanation. But, even biologically inspired personality theories currently use an intuitive language-based approach for scale development that lacks biological anchors. I argue that teleonomic "purpose" explains the organisation and outputs of conserved brain emotion systems, where high activation is adaptive in specific situations but is otherwise maladaptive. Simple modulators of whole-system sensitivity evolved because the requisite adaptive level can vary across people and time. Sensitivity to a modulator is an abstract predictive personality factor that operates at the neural level but provides a causal explanation of both coherence and occasional apparent incoherence in ABCD variation. Neuromodulators impact all levels of the "personality hierarchy" from metatraits to aspects: stability appears altered by serotonergic drugs, neuroticism by ketamine and trait anxiety by simple anxiolytic drugs. Here, the tools of psychiatry transfer to personality research and imply both interaction between levels and oblique factor mappings to ABCD. On this view, much psychopathology reflects extremes of neural-level personality factors, and we can view much pharmacotherapy as temporarily altering personality. So, particularly for personality factors linked to basic emotions and their disorders, I think we should start with evolutionary biology and look directly at conserved neural-level modulators for our explanatory personality constructs and only invoke higher order, emergent, explanations when neural-level explanation fails.

Highlights

  • 1.1 Personality neuroscience: a problemIf I am to analyse personality, I must first ask those who study it “What, at the psychological level, are the things I must explain”

  • The three types of theory that I have briefly surveyed above approach emotional systems and traits from different starting points

  • If we focus on the GIS, we can see a progression (Figure 3B, D) from a primitive module in the homolog of the current dorsolateral periaqueductal grey (PAG), through its expansion to allow more extensive conflict processing, to a split into a lower and a higher level module, and similar progressive splitting into distinct ever-higher-level modules

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Summary

Personality neuroscience: a problem

If (as a neuroscientist) I am to analyse personality, I must first ask those who study it “What, at the psychological level, are the things I must explain”. As someone who started totally outside this area, I feel the capacity to even ask this question at the present time creates a major problem for the neuroscientist wanting to identify the things that neural dynamics should explain There are those who would argue that this factor identification problem is solved by a general agreement as to factors and structure. ABCD variance can be analysed using psychopharmacology’s therapeutic tools (with “anxiolytic” drugs that are not “panicolytic” marking out systems involved in some form of trait anxiety as opposed to forms of trait panic) Such neurobiology need not be linear (e.g., Burger & Lang, 2001), and so the predicted ABCD patterns may depart significantly from those captured by the fundamentally linear, surface-level, factor analysis of lexically derived items (what I mean by the “lexical approach” is explained in the section on it below). My final conclusion will be that this lexical derivation of scales is the opposite of what should be done with largely conserved emotion-related traits, valid it may be for personality more generally

Personality neuroscience: some existing theories
Personality neuroscience – the lexical approach?
A new nomenclature for emotion systems
State versus trait biology
Bottom-up personality biology?
The argument for neural-level personality factors
Types of biological explanation
An emotion is a teleonomic purpose
Teleonomic purpose and state control
Teleonomic purpose and trait control
Complex circuits but simple modulation
Independent factors but oblique aetiology
Mapping personality to the brain
Conclusions
Full Text
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