Five Questions With: Tara White

"We assessed extraversion using standard self-report measures. Reports on such measures are highly reliable, and have good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. "

Tara White is assistant professor of behavioral and social sciences in the Brown University School of Public Health. She recently co-authored a study examining the brains of two types of extroverts – “people persons” and “go-getters.” White’s research interests include the biological bases of differences in personality and acute drug effects.

PBN: You can now see personality differences in people’s brain scans. What has been the most surprising finding so far?
WHITE:
Based on people’s self reports of personality, we expected to see an overlapping yet distinct pattern of gray matter volumes associated with these traits. The findings replicate what we see in people’s self reports of emotion – that there is an overlapping yet distinctive structure to different types of extroversion. The parallel structure in emotion and in the brain was, for me, one of the most interesting findings.

PBN: In doing the research project focused on different types of extroverts, how reliable were subjects’ self-identification? Do extroverts describe themselves reliably and can your scans corroborate that?
WHITE:
We assessed extraversion using standard self-report measures. Reports on such measures are highly reliable, and have good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. That we found a relationship between these self-report measures, and the objective measures of gray matter volumes in the brain using structural MRI, provides evidence that people’s self reports about their emotional lives are getting at something that is biologically meaningful.

PBN: What distinguishes the two different kinds of extroverts you studied, both in personality and in the neural correlates you studied?
WHITE:
Agentic extroversion is a personality dimension that reflects between-person differences in social leadership, pursuit of goals, and the sensitivity to reward. Affiliative extroversion is a related but discriminable dimension, which involves between-person differences in gregariousness, social warmth, and affection. We found a differential relationship between agentic extroversion, affiliative extroversion, and gray matter volume in several brain regions. One region, the medial orbital frontal cortex, was positively associated with both traits. This finding confirms the importance of the medial orbital frontal cortex to the overall domain of extroversion.

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PBN: How can knowing the different brain characteristics of extroverts, and even different types of extroverts, assist in improving human health?
WHITE:
I think that any time we can learn more about the biology of normal, healthy emotion, we have an opportunity learn about what it is to be human, what connects us, and also what makes us unique. These are normal, healthy emotional traits, and normal, healthy people will vary on them. Understanding the biology of that normal, healthy variation in emotionality helps us better understand and appreciate the people around us.

PBN: Your most recent research has an interesting panoply of sponsors – the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Lifespan/Tufts/Brown Center for AIDS Research, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism – do these sponsors share an interest in the attributes of extroverts, or, if not, what’s the connection, if any, among them?
WHITE:
The study combined data that were collected in several prior projects, in order to have a large enough sample size for the analysis. Understanding the structural correlates of emotion provides a base of information, which can be used to help understand and interpret findings in patient groups and in healthy adults. The findings are relevant to studies of structure and function, emotional processing, well-being, and potential changes in these outcomes over time in the context of clinical disorders such as alcohol or drug misuse, abuse, and environmental insults to the body such as HIV infection.

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