Personality and mood affect brain response to personal choice

Personality traits and mental health affect how people value personal control in decision making, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. Our brain’s reward and motivation systems show higher activity when we feel personal control in a situation and when we receive rewards that we’ve earned, rather than been given–but this activity was dampened in people with passive personalities or with symptoms of depression. The connections between personality, choice, and depression may help guide researchers to understand how to protect healthy people from developing the illness.

“This study, which used computational models of reward behaviors and functional MRI, represents an advance in our understanding of how rewards shape choices in the brains of healthy individuals,” said Cameron Carter, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

In the study, the researchers used an MRI scanner to measure the brain activity of 122 healthy participants while the participants played a computer game to earn rewards. “We were interested to see how people value rewarding outcomes based on their own personally-driven decisions, versus those that are decided for them by the computer,” said first-author Liana Romaniuk, PhD, University of Edinburgh.

Source: Personality and mood affect brain response to personal choice