Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 146, 1 February 2017, Pages 894-903
NeuroImage

Peering into the brain to predict behavior: Peer-reported, but not self-reported, conscientiousness links threat-related amygdala activity to future problem drinking

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.10.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Neural correlates of self- and peer-reported personality are examined.

  • Higher amygdala activity is associated with peer-reported conscientiousness.

  • Peer-reported conscientiousness predicts lower future problem drinking in men.

  • Peer report may reveal novel associations between brain, personality, and behavior.

Abstract

Personality traits such as conscientiousness as self-reported by individuals can help predict a range of outcomes, from job performance to longevity. Asking others to rate the personality of their acquaintances often provides even better predictive power than using self-report. Here, we examine whether peer-reported personality can provide a better link between brain function, namely threat-related amygdala activity, and future health-related behavior, namely problem drinking, than self-reported personality. Using data from a sample of 377 young adult university students who were rated on five personality traits by peers, we find that higher threat-related amygdala activity to fearful facial expressions is associated with higher peer-reported, but not self-reported, conscientiousness. Moreover, higher peer-reported, but not self-reported, conscientiousness predicts lower future problem drinking more than one year later, an effect specific to men. Remarkably, relatively higher amygdala activity has an indirect effect on future drinking behavior in men, linked by peer-reported conscientiousness to lower future problem drinking. Our results provide initial evidence that the perceived conscientiousness of an individual by their peers uniquely reflects variability in a core neural mechanism supporting threat responsiveness. These novel patterns further suggest that incorporating peer-reported measures of personality into individual differences research can reveal novel predictive pathways of risk and protection for problem behaviors.

Introduction

Our peers' perceptions of us may provide unique insights into our mental health, personality, and even mortality. For example, Jackson et al. (2015) found that friend-reported personality traits were generally a better predictor of mortality than self-reported personality traits. Specifically, when controlling for self-reported personality traits, lower friend-reported conscientiousness and openness predicted higher mortality risk in men while lower friend-reported agreeableness and emotional stability predicted higher mortality in women. Informant reports more broadly have been shown to be useful predictors across a range of other outcomes, including academic achievement (Connelly and Ones, 2010; Kurtz et al., 2012), physical health in adulthood (Israel et al., 2014), job performance (Oh et al., 2011), clinical severity of psychopathology (Verhulst and van der Ende, 1991), and the future emergence of depressive symptoms (Ronning et al., 2011), often predicting additional variance in these outcomes above and beyond self-report. While the nature of such predictive associations is unclear, it has been hypothesized that informant reports may overcome certain biases present in self-report data, and that when multiple informant reports are obtained, averaging across informants increases the reliability of measurements (Jackson et al., 2015, Oh et al., 2011, Vazire and Mehl, 2008). In this way, it is possible that peer-reports of trait-like personality may also better reflect biological features of an individual than self-report.

In the context of behavioral neuroscience, we often consider associations between individual measures of brain function and self-reported personality or behavior (Hariri, 2009). Peer reports may offer a unique window onto the behavioral correlates of brain function from observers who are familiar with an individual across different contexts and can make judgments based on observations of behavior aggregated over time. Thus, peer reports may map onto inter-individual variability in behaviorally- and clinically-relevant brain function not captured through self-report. As such, peer reports may help us identify previously undetected links between brain function and personality that can subsequently inform relative risk for psychopathology or even optimize treatment strategies (Flory et al., 2002, Kotov et al., 2010, Naragon-Gainey and Watson, 2014, Ronning et al., 2011, Verhulst and van der Ende, 1991, Wardenaar et al., 2014).

The goal of the present work was to examine whether variability in behaviorally- and clinically-relevant brain function, namely threat-related amygdala activity assessed using BOLD fMRI, is associated with peer-reported personality traits including extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, and agreeableness, above and beyond self-reported personality. We further planned to test whether these associations were useful for predicting clinically-relevant behavioral outcomes by testing whether peer-reported personality traits predicted future problem drinking above and beyond self-reported personality traits. We focused our analyses on threat-related amygdala activity because this neural phenotype has been extensively examined in relation to self-reported behaviorally- and clinically-relevant outcomes in this (Nikolova et al., 2016, Swartz et al., 2015, Swartz et al., 2016) and other samples (Glahn et al., 2007, Marinkovic et al., 2009). In particular, in the present sample, we have found that higher threat-related amygdala activity moderates the experience of stress-related problem drinking associated with reward-related brain function (Nikolova et al., 2016). Furthermore, peer reports of personality specifically were chosen for our analyses because our sample of young adult full-time university students spends a relatively large proportion of time socializing with friends, and thus peers may have more opportunities to observe their behaviors across multiple contexts than other potential informants such as instructors or parents (Eagan et al., 2014). For each participant, we used personality ratings from one to two peers as well as their own self-reported personality.

Our prior work in this sample has demonstrated that individuals with higher threat-related amygdala activity have lower levels of self-reported extraversion (Swartz et al., 2016), as well as higher levels of mood and anxiety symptoms under stress (Swartz et al., 2015). Prior research in other samples has also indicated a positive association between amygdala activity and self-reported neuroticism (Chan et al., 2009, Everaerd et al., 2015, Haas et al., 2007). We therefore hypothesized that higher threat-related amygdala activity would be associated with lower peer-reported extraversion but higher peer-reported neuroticism. We did not form directional hypotheses regarding the other personality traits examined given the lack of research in this area to date. Prior research on the personality correlates of problem drinking behavior with both self- and informant-rated personality has indicated that higher extraversion and neuroticism and lower conscientiousness and agreeableness are associated with problem drinking or alcohol use disorders (Flory et al., 2002, Hampson et al., 2006, Malouff et al., 2007). Thus, we further hypothesized that peer-reported personality would predict future problem drinking in a similar direction, and that it would explain additional variance above and beyond self-reported personality (Connelly and Ones, 2010, Jackson et al., 2015).

Section snippets

Participants

Of the 1202 participants recruited as part of the ongoing Duke Neurogenetics Study (DNS) as of June, 2015, participants for the present study included 418 young adult university students who had informant data from at least one peer. All procedures were approved by the Duke University Medical Center and participants provided informed consent before study initiation. Participants were college-aged (M=19.8 years, SD=1.3, range: 18 to 22) and 61% were female. Within the current sample, 48% were

Characteristics of peer reports

The reliability of the peer-reported personality measures, assessed using Cronbach's alpha, were acceptable as follows: extraversion, α=.77, agreeableness, α=.70, conscientiousness, α=.76, neuroticism, α=.78, and openness, α=.74. Based on commonly used cutoffs (Hallgren, 2012), inter-rater agreement (for cases that had two peer informants) was fair for extraversion, average measure ICC=.70, single measure ICC=.54; agreeableness, average measure ICC=.65, single measure ICC=.48; and

Discussion

Young adults, especially university students, spend a relatively large amount of time interacting with their peers, and as such, peers can provide unique information about a given individual's personality based on repeated interactions across multiple contexts. In the present study, we found that university students exhibiting relatively higher amygdala activity to fearful facial expressions were rated by their peers as being relatively lower in extraversion but higher in conscientiousness.

Acknowledgments

The Duke Neurogenetics Study is supported by Duke University and NIH grant DA033369. JRS received support through the Center for the Study of Adolescent Risk and Resilience (P30DA023026) and through NIH grant R01AG049789. ARH is supported by NIH grants R01DA033369 and R01AG049789.

References (44)

  • T.F. Babor et al.

    The Alcohol Use Disorders Identificaton Test: Guidelines for Use in Primary Care

    (2001)
  • S.W.Y. Chan et al.

    Risk for depression and neural responses to fearful facial expressions of emotion

    Br. J. Psychiatry

    (2009)
  • B.S. Connelly et al.

    An other perspective on personality: meta-analytic integration of observers' accuracy and predictive validity

    Psychol. Bull.

    (2010)
  • P.T. Costa et al.

    Manual for the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PIR) and the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI)

    (1992)
  • F.C. Davis et al.

    A tale of two negatives: differential memory modulation by threat-related facial expressions

    Emotion

    (2011)
  • K. Eagan et al.

    The American freshman: National Norms Fall 2014

    (2014)
  • M.B. First et al.

    Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders, Research Version, Non-patient Edition

    (1996)
  • K. Flory et al.

    The relations among personality, symptoms of alcohol and marijuana abuse, and symptoms of comorbid psychopathology: results from a community sample

    Exp. Clin. Psychopharmacol.

    (2002)
  • B.W. Haas et al.

    Emotional conflict and neuroticism: personality-dependent activation in the amygdala and subgenual anterior cingulate

    Behav. Neurosci.

    (2007)
  • K.A. Hallgren

    Computing inter-rater reliability for observational data: an overview and tutorial

    Tutor Quant. Methods Psychol.

    (2012)
  • S.E. Hampson et al.

    Forty years on: teachers’ assessments of children’s personality traits predict self-reported health behaviors and outcomes at midlife

    Health Psychol.

    (2006)
  • A.R. Hariri

    The neurobiology of individual differences in complex behavioral traits

    Annu. Rev. Neurosci.

    (2009)
  • Cited by (5)

    • The brain in social context: A systematic review of substance use and social processing from adolescence to young adulthood

      2022, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
      Citation Excerpt :

      Use of alcohol and cannabis is associated with disrupted socioemotional function, including processing of emotional faces, in adults (Miller et al., 2015) and adolescents (Leiker et al., 2019). A larger body of literature (compared to social reward) has focused on the extent to which the brain’s response to emotion (e.g., facial expressions) predicts substance use, especially when considering stress and internalizing symptoms (Nikolova et al., 2016; Spechler et al., 2015, 2019; Swartz et al., 2017). Findings suggest that relatively reduced social threat-related reactivity of the amygdala (i.e., to fearful faces) may increase risk of alcohol use or AUDs.

    View full text