Scientists Seek Personality's Roots in Brain

June 27 -- A happy, outgoing person who likes to be around people is far more likely to return a smile from someone else than an introverted person who doesn't enjoy being in a crowd.

Astonishing, you say? Probably not, because most of us already know that the life of the party is usually more responsive than the wallflower, but researchers at Stanford University have shown that how we respond to a happy face is more than skin deep. It involves the biological, genetic and psychological factors that made us who we are.

At the heart of the research are some of the most fundamental questions regarding the human personality. What makes us different from each other?

"What we are wondering is, where does personality come from?" says John Gabrieli, associate professor of psychology at Stanford.

Entering the Brain

Not too many years ago, researchers were very limited in their resources, and the study of personality — and the human brain — was largely an intuitive process that often led to major errors.

"It was all sort of like a black box," Gabrieli says. "You put something in and you get something out." But there wasn't any way of knowing what was really going on inside that "box" as the brain processed the information.

In recent years that has changed dramatically. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, allows scientists to pinpoint which parts of the brain react to external stimuli, and in some cases, how much.

"Now we can hunt down the specific part of the brain that determines how we will interpret a situation as desirable or threatening," he adds. "That's pretty exciting."

The Stanford research, published in a recent issue of the journal Science, suggests that we respond to something that is potentially pleasant in very different ways because our personalities are not the same. Whether we react at all depends on whether a pea-sized bit of tissue near the center of the brain "lights up" when we see something nice, like a happy face. That can be measured with the non-invasive magnetic imager.