Individuals often interpret the same event in different ways. How do personality traits modulate brain activity evoked by a complex stimulus? Here we report results from a naturalistic paradigm designed to draw out both neural and behavioral variation along a specific dimension of interest, namely paranoia. Participants listen to a narrative during functional MRI describing an ambiguous social scenario, written such that some individuals would find it highly suspicious, while others less so. Using inter-subject correlation analysis, we identify several brain areas that are differentially synchronized during listening between participants with high and low trait-level paranoia, including theory-of-mind regions. Follow-up analyses indicate that these regions are more active to mentalizing events in high-paranoia individuals. Analyzing participants’ speech as they freely recall the narrative reveals semantic and syntactic features that also scale with paranoia. Results indicate that a personality trait can act as an intrinsic “prime,” yielding different neural and behavioral responses to the same stimulus across individuals.
Trait paranoia shapes inter-subject synchrony in brain activity during an ambiguous social narrative
FIM Authors
Year of Publication
2018
Journal
Nature Communications
Volume
9
Date Published
Jan-12-2018
URL
http://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04387-2
DOI
10.1038/s41467-018-04387-2