T89. Personality psychopathology five and P300 in young healthy adults

Abstract

Introduction Personality traits are dispositions to act, think or feel. The Personality Psychopathology Five model includes the following traits to describe personality: Aggressiveness, Psychoticism, Lack of Control, Neuroticism and Introversion. In P300 associations have been observed between amplitude and personality traits: in the neuroticism and psychoticism traits less amplitude is reported while in the extroversion, openness, kindness and responsibility traits the amplitude is greater. In P300, two subcomponents, P3a and P3b, have been described. The Continuous Performance Test is a series of neuropsychological assessment paradigms that have been used to favor P300. The aim of this research was to describe the relationship between Personality Psychopathology Five and P300 in healthy young adults. Methods The sample was 60 healthy adults with an average age of 21 years one month, S.D. ± 2 years five months, 30 men and 30 women with an average Intellectual Coefficient (102, S.D. ± 8), with no history of neurological and/or psychiatric diseases, with clinical EEG within the normal limits for the age. The EEG was performed with 62 gold electrodes according to the international system 10–20 during the execution of the visual AX-CPT. The task consisted in the presentation of letters J, K S and T on a monitor 60 cm away from the view of the participants. The following instruction was given for the task: “you will see some letters appear on this screen. You must press button number 1 every time the T appears after S ”. The ERPs were analyzed under an oddball paradigm of three stimuli, where the infrequent stimulus was the letter T (target stimulus) and the distractor was the letters J, S or K presented after the S. The analysis window (time-windows) was −100 to 500 ms and the analysis derivations were FZ and PZ. Results In the FZ derivation, the subcomponent P3a was identified at 360 ms before the distractor stimulus, with an amplitude of 1.8 μ V, and frontal topography. In PZ the subcomponent P3b was observed at 302 ms before the infrequent stimulus, with an amplitude of 0.5 μ V and subsequent topographic distribution. The dimensions of the distractor stimulus were associated with the personality traits. In women, the increase in the social Introversion trait was related to a lower amplitude ( r = −0.470) while the lack of control trait was greater ( r = 0.450). In men, the increase in the scores of the aggressiveness trait was directly associated with the increase in the amplitude of the distractor stimulus ( r = 0.413). Conclusion In women, personality traits that involved inhibition were associated with processes of inhibitory control at the cognitive and behavioral levels, whereas in men, traits that reflect hyperactivation or hypervigilance such as aggression were associated with the use of more neuronal resources.