Neurology Medicine

Posts Tagged ‘Personality’

Scientists explain that many previous investigations of non-human animals have shown that chronic stress is linked to certain adverse effects on the brain. From these investigations, Head and his colleagues established the hypothesis on which they based their study: negative traits of human personality could also affect our brain, in particular during the aging process.

Thus, they assumed that neurosis, a mental disorder with no evidence of organ damage characterized by a high level of anxiety and the onset of repetitive behaviors to try to reduce stress levels, should be damaging to structural brain volume. The investigation focused on the middle temporal and prefrontal regions of the brain because it is these which produce the greatest changes during aging, and also because they are the brain areas that sit in certain cognitive abilities such as attention, emotions and memory.

According to statements by one of the authors of the research, psychologist Denise Head, appeared in a statement from Washington University, the results are a first step toward understanding how personality can affect brain aging. Head argues that these data clearly demonstrate a relationship between personality and brain volume, particularly in brain regions associated with social information processing and emotions.

Also, the researcher adds that the results suggest that personality influences the degree of aging of the human brain and also the way the brain aging may affect the personality of each individual. The researchers plan to conduct future studies to monitor the structural changes that will suffer the brain of the participants in this research, in order to deepen this process and its links to personality.