Project "Socio-cultural Determinants of the Impact of the Circulation of Representations on the Human Mind and Possibilities of Remediation" (COREmind)
Published December 14, 2025 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Deviation From Typical Brain Activity During Naturalistic Stimulation Is Related to Personality Traits

Authors/Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Computer Science
  • 2. ROR icon National Institute of Mental Health
  • 3. Institute of Physiology, Czech Academy of Science
  • 4. ROR icon Charles University
  • 5. ROR icon College of Polytechnics Jihlava
  • 6. ROR icon Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Psychology
  • 7. ROR icon Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine
  • 8. ROR icon Czech Academy of Sciences
  • 9. Národní ústav duševního zdraví

Description

The relationship between personality and brain activity has been an increasingly popular topic of neuroscientific research. Naturalistic viewing has been shown to enhance individual differences and might, therefore, be particularly useful for exploring this relationship. Here, we thus examine neural signatures of personality using naturalistic fMRI of 82 healthy subjects. We implemented a simple dimensionality reduction method to characterize brain activity by its “typicality,” assessed a range of personality traits using widely-used personality inventories, and tested the relationship between the two. We found that there is, indeed, a relationship between personality and the typicality of brain activity, which appears to be most consistently manifested by lower typicality in subjects with higher Neuroticism/Harm Avoidance. Our results highlight the usefulness of naturalistic viewing data for exploring the relationship between individual differences in personality and brain activity.

Files

Psychophysiology - 2025 - Jajcay - Deviation From Typical Brain Activity During Naturalistic Stimulation Is Related to.pdf

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Preprint: 10.1101/2024.04.23.586759 (DOI)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.17605/OSF.IO/795HB (DOI)

Funding

Ministry of Education Youth and Sports
Brain Dynamics CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004643
Czech Science Foundation
21-32608S
Ministry of Education Youth and Sports
COREmind CZ.02.01.01/00/23_025/0008715
Czech Technical University in Prague
SGS23/119/OHK3/2T/13

Dates

Collected
2025-01-15
Accepted
2025-11-17