Personality traits vary in their association with brain activity across situations

Samyogita Hardikar; Brontë McKeown; Adam Turnbull; Ting Xu; Sofie L. Valk; Boris C. Bernhardt; Daniel S. Margulies; Michael P. Milham; Elizabeth Jefferies; Robert Leech; Arno Villringer; Jonathan Smallwood

doi:10.1038/s42003-024-07061-0

Personality traits vary in their association with brain activity across situations

Samyogita Hardikar^*, Brontë McKeown, Adam Turnbull, Ting Xu, Sofie L. Valk, Boris C. Bernhardt, Daniel S. Margulies, Michael P. Milham, Elizabeth Jefferies, Robert Leech, Arno Villringer, Jonathan Smallwood

^*Corresponding author for this work

Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Human cognition supports complex behaviour across a range of situations, and traits (e.g. personality) influence how we react in these different contexts. Although viewing traits as situationally grounded is common in social sciences, often studies attempting to link brain activity to human traits examine brain-trait associations in a single task, or, under passive conditions like wakeful rest. These studies, often referred to as brain wide association studies (BWAS) have recently become the subject of controversy because results are often unreliable even with large sample sizes. Although there are important statistical reasons why BWAS yield inconsistent results, we hypothesised that the situation in which brain activity is measured will impact the power in detecting a reliable link to specific traits. We performed a state-space analysis where tasks from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) were organized into a low-dimensional space based on how they activated different large-scale neural systems. We examined how individuals’ observed brain activity across these different contexts related to their personality. We found that for multiple personality traits, stronger associations with brain activity emerge in some tasks than others. These data highlight the importance of context-bound views for understanding how brain activity links to trait variation in human behaviour.

Original language	English
Article number	1498
Number of pages	8
Journal	Communications Biology
Volume	7
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-07061-0
Publication status	Published - 12 Nov 2024

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Personality traits vary in their association with brain activity across situations
© The Author(s) 2024
Final published version, 13.2 MBLicence: CC BY

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title = "Personality traits vary in their association with brain activity across situations",

abstract = "Human cognition supports complex behaviour across a range of situations, and traits (e.g. personality) influence how we react in these different contexts. Although viewing traits as situationally grounded is common in social sciences, often studies attempting to link brain activity to human traits examine brain-trait associations in a single task, or, under passive conditions like wakeful rest. These studies, often referred to as brain wide association studies (BWAS) have recently become the subject of controversy because results are often unreliable even with large sample sizes. Although there are important statistical reasons why BWAS yield inconsistent results, we hypothesised that the situation in which brain activity is measured will impact the power in detecting a reliable link to specific traits. We performed a state-space analysis where tasks from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) were organized into a low-dimensional space based on how they activated different large-scale neural systems. We examined how individuals{\textquoteright} observed brain activity across these different contexts related to their personality. We found that for multiple personality traits, stronger associations with brain activity emerge in some tasks than others. These data highlight the importance of context-bound views for understanding how brain activity links to trait variation in human behaviour.",

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AU - McKeown, Brontë

AU - Turnbull, Adam

AU - Xu, Ting

AU - Valk, Sofie L.

AU - Bernhardt, Boris C.

AU - Margulies, Daniel S.

AU - Milham, Michael P.

AU - Jefferies, Elizabeth

AU - Leech, Robert

AU - Villringer, Arno

AU - Smallwood, Jonathan

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Personality traits vary in their association with brain activity across situations

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