14 DAY TRIAL // In a finding that may finally help explains why introverted individuals prefer to spend their time on their own, researchers discovered that these people tend to place less meaning on the faces they see than socially-opened peers.
In other words, the new research indicates that extroverted people are more attentive to the faces of people around them, which naturally makes them more likely to associate at least some meaning with them.
This simply doesn't hold true for introverted individuals, who brain scans show cannot distinguish between the faces of other people and a wide variety of inanimate objects.
The findings put a new perspective on social behavior, in the sense that they explain why extroverted individuals constantly seek the company of others, whereas more introverted persons prefer being on their own, reading a book for example.
Additionally, the work adds further credence to the theory arguing that neural traits, and the patterns in which pathways in the brain are interconnected, play a huge role in determining people's personalities.
“This is just one more piece of evidence to support the assertion that personality is not merely a psychology concept,” explains scientist Inna Fishman.
“There's some broader foundation for the behavior that you see […] implicating that there are neural bases for different personality types,” adds Fishman, who holds an appointment at the La Jolla, California-based Salk Institute for Biological Sciences.
Introverted individuals, in experiments, “just didn’t place a larger weight on social stimuli than they did on any other stimuli, of which flowers are one example,” Fishman reveals, quoted by LiveScience.
“[This] supports the claim that introverts, or their brains, might be indifferent to people – they can take them or leave them, so to speak. The introvert's brain treats interactions with people the same way it treats encounters with other, non-human information, such as inanimate objects for example,” she adds.
The new investigation was conducted on a group of 28 test subjects, age between 18 and 40. Their personalities had been previously rated from introverted to very extroverted.
Fishman's team had their neural activity followed using a technique known as electroencephalography (EEG), where electrodes placed on the scalp produce a chart depicting electrical activity in the brain.
Details of the research were presented on Friday, at the 118th annual convention of the American Psychological Association (APA).