Personality Influences The Aging Brain
A team of psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, has discovered a relationship between the personality of older people and the state of the brain in old age. According to the scientists in an article published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, in general, during aging, there is a reduction in the volumes of certain brain regions, particularly in the middle temporal and prefrontal areas. However, these reductions or changes do not occur equally in all people, because, according to the results, neuroanatomical integrity can be modified to a lesser or greater extent depending on certain individual personality traits.
Three personality traits analyzed
The scientists studied, namely, three personality characteristics and their relationship with age-related brain changes: neurosis, conscientiousness and extraversion. To do so, showed images of brains of 79 volunteers aged between 44 and 88 years by a technology known as magnetic resonance scanner (MRI). The MRI uses the magnetic resonance phenomenon for information on the structure and composition of the brain. This information is then processed by computers, and transformed into images of the brain interior. Before being subjected to the scanner, participants also provided data on their personality.
The combination of information established that more neurotic individuals had smaller volumes of gray matter in the middle temporal and frontal areas of the brain those less neurotic individuals. An opposite pattern was observed in the case of conscientiousness. In regard to extroversion, the study could not establish any relationship between this feature determining the character and status of volunteers’ brains.