London, May 20 (IANS) How come some of us really enjoy the company of people while others seem so detached and independent?
Cambridge University researchers have discovered that someone's warmth or sentimentality may depend on the structure of their brain.
Mael Lebreton and colleagues from the Cambridge University department of psychiatry, along with Oulu University, Finland, examined the relationship between personality and brain structure in 41 male volunteers.
The volunteers underwent a brain scan using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). They also completed a questionnaire that asked them to rate themselves on items such as 'I make a warm personal connection with most people', or 'I like to please other people as much as I can.'
The answers to the questionnaire provide an overall measure of emotional warmth and sociability called social reward dependence.
The researchers then analysed the relationship between social reward dependence and the concentration of grey matter (brain-cell containing tissue) in different brain regions.
They found that the greater the concentration of tissue in the orbitofrontal cortex (the outer strip of the brain just above the eyes), and in the ventral striatum (a deep structure in brain centre), the higher they tended to score on the social reward dependence measure.
Graham Murray, who is funded by the Medical Research Council and led the research, said: 'Sociability and emotional warmth are very complex features of our personality. This research helps us understand at a biological level why people differ in the degrees to which we express those traits.'
Incidentally, the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum have previously been shown to be important for the brain's processing of much simpler rewards like sweet tastes or sexual stimuli.
The research could also lead to new insights into psychiatric disorders where difficulties in social interaction are prominent, such as autism or schizophrenia, said a Cambridge release.
'Patients with certain psychiatric conditions often experience difficulties in feeling emotional closeness, and this can have a big impact on their life. It could be that the cause of these difficulties is at least partly due to brain structural features of those disorders,' said Murray.
The research was published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.
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