Self-referential judgments from the same personality trait scales show increased representational similarity in mPFC.

ABSTRACT: Self-report questionnaires are widely used across psychology and related disciplines, yet the cognitive and neural processes underlying how individuals generate responses to such items remain poorly understood. Here, we investigated whether items from the same psychological scale evoke similar neural activation patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a region consistently implicated in self-referential processing. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 32 participants completed a self-reference task in which they judged how well 72 personality-related questionnaire items (e.g., from the Big Five, emotion regulation, and well-being scales) described themselves. Using representational similarity analysis (RSA), we found that items from the same scale elicited

SUBMITTER: Izuma K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12722351 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature