Researchers said on Wednesday that the same part of the brain that makes us crave food and sex might also help determine whether somebody is a warm and sentimental “people” person, Reuters reported.
The study, reported in the European Journal of Neuroscience Scientists, found a greater concentration of brain tissue in certain areas of the brain may drive some people to gush fuzzy feelings more than others.
Graham Murray of Cambridge University in Britain, who led the study, said they could now pin down the relationship between a specific aspect of someone’s personality and a specific region of their brain.
“Those are the regions that we know are important for basic biological drives like for food and sex,” he said.
The study collected data from questionnaires used to help measure the relationship between personality and brain structure in 41 men.
The researchers, who collaborated with a team at Oulu University in Finland, asked the volunteers how well they thought they connected to people, how they showed their emotions and whether they liked to please people.
Brain scans were employed to analyze the concentration of grey matter””tissue rich in brain cells known as neurons””in different regions.
The study found that those subjects who scored “warm and fuzzy” on the questionnaires had more brain tissue in the orbitofrontal cortex””the outer strip of the brain just above the eyes””and in a deep structure in the center of the brain called the ventrial striatum.
Research studies in the past had shown that the two areas were important for how the brain processed certain pleasures such as sweet tastes or sexual stimuli.
Murray explained that sociability and emotional warmth are complex features of the personality and the new research provides a better understanding at a biological level of why people differ in the degrees to which those traits are expressed.
However, he said cultural differences could also play a role, given that Americans tended to score higher on personality tests than Scandinavians, for instance.
The new findings could offer clues into how the human brain evolved and may even provide further insights into psychiatric disorders like autism, schizophrenia and other conditions marked by social interaction difficulties.
Murray said the brain structure that supports social interaction evolved out of the brain structures that supported basic survival drives.
“It opens a line of enquiry to investigate some of these problems that psychiatric patients may have,” he said.
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