Brain shape linked to personality differences
Florida State University College of Medicine Associate Professor Antonio Terracciano joined a team of researchers from the United States, United Kingdom and Italy to examine the connection between personality traits and brain structure. Their study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience , looked at differences in the anatomy of the cortex (the outer layer of the brain) as indexed by three measures -- the thickness, area, and amount of folding in the cortex -- and how these measures related to the five major personality traits. The traits include neuroticism , the tendency to be in a negative emotional state; extraversion, the tendency to be sociable and enthusiastic; openness, how open-minded a person is; agreeableness, a measure of altruism and cooperativeness; and conscientiousness, a measure of self-control and determination. The study involved an imaging dataset from more than 500 individuals made publicly available by the Human Connectome...