Individual psychological traits predict the activity of limbic and prefrontal areas

Characterizing the neurofunctional correlates of individual psychological differences is one of the most challenging issues in today’s cognitive neuroscience. Crucially, it requires careful selection of psychological trait measures, state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques, and large participants’ samples. Here we leverage the HCP1200 database (Van Essen et al., 2013) to explore whether and how cognitive and emotional traits, measured through a comprehensive set of questionnaires and computer-based tasks (Barch et al., 2013), predict regional brain activation during a highly demanding cognitive task (2-back WM) and an emotion recognition task, across a sample of 894 healthy volunteers. Four factors (fluid intelligence, executive functioning, spatial orientation, and negative affect) extracted from the individual scores in the NIH Toolbox, Penn Emotion Recognition Test, and Penn Progressive Matrices Task were used as predictors of regional activations in limbic and prefrontal regions of interest defined based on group activations estimated through a standard whole-brain random-effects analysis in a standard surface space. Higher fluid intelligence was associated with higher activity in dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during fear processing. The activation of amygdala, hippocampus, and thalamus were positively correlated with spatial orientation during angry faces. These result shows how limbic and prefrontal areas are correlated with individual psychological traits.