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This study of 1,049 healthy young adults from the Human Connectome Project found that the personality trait of openness to experience is associated with better theory of mind (the ability to understand others' mental states), and that cortical thickness in the superior frontal gyrus partially explains this relationship. Specifically, higher openness was linked to thinner cortex in this brain region, and thinner cortex was associated with better social cognition performance, with the brain structure accounting for approximately 8% of the total relationship between personality and social understanding.
Why it matters
The findings suggest a potential neurobiological pathway linking personality traits to social cognitive abilities, which could inform our understanding of individual differences in social functioning. However, the small effect sizes and cross-sectional design mean these results require longitudinal replication before drawing conclusions about causal mechanisms.
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⚠️ Preprint – Noch nicht peer-reviewed
Dieser Artikel wurde noch nicht von unabhängigen Experten begutachtet. Die Ergebnisse sind vorläufig und sollten mit Vorsicht interpretiert werden.
Background: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to infer the mental states of others, varies considerably across healthy adults. Openness to experience has been linked both to social-cognitive abilities and to thinner prefrontal cortex, but whether cortical structure statistically accounts for the association between openness and ToM is unknown. We tested whether bilateral superior frontal gyrus (SFG) cortical thickness mediates this association. Methods: Data from 1,049 healthy young adults with complete data were drawn from the Human Connectome Project. ToM was indexed by accuracy on the Heider-Simmel social animation task, openness by the NEO Five-Factor Inventory, and SFG thickness by FreeSurfer. Models adjusted for age, sex, intracranial volume and fluid intelligence; indirect effects were tested with 5,000 bootstrap resamples, and Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate correction was applied. Results: Openness showed a positive total effect on ToM accuracy (beta = .081, p = .009). Higher openness was associated with thinner left and right SFG (beta = -.085 and -.084), and thinner SFG with higher ToM accuracy (beta = -.082 and -.075). Indirect effects were significant (left: .0069, 95% CI [.0010, .0158]; right: .0063, 95% CI [.0007, .0146]), accounting for approximately 8.5% and 7.8% of the total effect, and remained significant after rank-based normalisation of the ceiling-affected ToM scores. Conclusions: SFG cortical thickness partially and statistically mediates the association between openness to experience and social cognition. Because the data are cross-sectional and effects are small, the findings do not establish a causal mechanism, neural efficiency or synaptic pruning, but they identify a candidate structural pathway for longitudinal testing.