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Neuroticism and extraversion mediate the association between loneliness and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

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Abstract

Loneliness is an unpleasant and distressing feeling that a person experiences when he/she perceives that his/her social relationships are lacking in someway, either quantitatively or qualitatively; this can be linked to anxiety, depression, and suicide risk. Previous studies have found that certain personality traits (which are temporally stable and heritable) are predictors of loneliness. However, little empirical evidence is available on the brain structures associated with loneliness, as well as how personality traits impact the relationship between loneliness and brain structure. Thus, the current study used voxel-based morphometry to identify the brain structures underlying individual differences in loneliness (as measured by the UCLA Loneliness Scale) in a large sample, and then, applied multiple mediation analyses to explore the nature of the influence of personality traits on the relationship between loneliness and brain structure. The results showed that lonely individuals had greater regional gray matter volume in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which might reflect immature functioning in terms of emotional regulation. More importantly, we found that neuroticism and extraversion partially mediated the relationship between the left DLPFC and loneliness. In summary, through morphometric and multiple mediation analyses, this paper further validates the influence of both neuroticism and extraversion on loneliness.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Xi-Nian Zuo for his helpful comments on the data analysis. This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31070900; 31271087), the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (2011) by the Ministry of Education, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (SWU1209101) and the Key Discipline Fund of National 211 Project (TR201208-1).

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, SWU, Ministry of Education, Chongqing, 400715, People’s Republic of China

    Xia Kong, Dongtao Wei, Wenfu Li, Lingli Cun, Song Xue, Qinglin Zhang & Jiang Qiu

  2. Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Beibei, Chongqing, 400715, People’s Republic of China

    Xia Kong, Dongtao Wei, Wenfu Li, Lingli Cun, Song Xue, Qinglin Zhang & Jiang Qiu

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  1. Xia Kong
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Correspondence to Jiang Qiu.

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Kong, X., Wei, D., Li, W. et al. Neuroticism and extraversion mediate the association between loneliness and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Exp Brain Res 233, 157–164 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-014-4097-4

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