The relationship between personality and brain activity has been an increasingly popular topic of neuroscientific research. Naturalistic viewing has been shown to enhance individual differences and might, therefore, be particularly useful for exploring this relationship. Here, we thus examine neural signatures of personality using naturalistic fMRI of 82 healthy subjects. We implemented a simple dimensionality reduction method to characterize brain activity by its "typicality," assessed a range of personality traits using widely-used personality inventories, and tested the relationship between the two. We found that there is, indeed, a relationship between personality and the typicality of brain activity, which appears to be most consistently manifested by lower typicality in subjects with higher Neuroticism/Harm Avoidance. Our results highlight the usefulness of naturalistic viewing data for exploring the relationship between individual differences in personality and brain activity.

Department of Cognitive Psychology Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences Prague Czech Republic

Department of Complex Systems Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences Prague Czech Republic

Department of Cybernetics Faculty of Electrical Engineering Czech Technical University Prague Prague Czech Republic

Department of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology 3rd Faculty of Medicine Charles University Prague Czech Republic

Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine Prague Czech Republic

National Institute of Mental Health Klecany Czech Republic

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Deviation From Typical Brain Activity During Naturalistic Stimulation Is Related to Personality Traits