Neuroticism and emotion regulation: An effective connectivity analysis of large-scale resting-state brain networks

Abstract The neurotic personality has an impact on the regulation of basic negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness. There has been extensive research in search of functional connectivity biomarkers of neuroticism and basic negative emotions but there is a lack of research based on effective connectivity. In the current research, we intended to determine the significance of causal interaction of three large-scale resting-state networks – default mode, salience, and executive networks – to predict neuroticism and basic negative emotions. In this study, a large-scale human connectome project dataset comprising functional MRI scans and self-reported scores of neuroticism and negative emotions of 1079 subjects, was utilized. Spectral dynamic causal modelling and parametric empirical Bayes was used to estimate the subject-level effective connectivity parameters and their group-level associations with the neuroticism and emotional scores. Leave-one-out cross-validation using parametric empirical Bayes was employed for prediction analysis. Our results for heightened emotions showed that the self-connection of right hippocampus can predict individuals with high fear, self-connections of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can predict individuals with high sadness. High anger, low sadness, and neuroticism scores of any emotion category except low fear, could not be predicted using triple network effective connectivity. Our findings revealed that the causal (directed) connections of the resting-state triple network can potentially serve as a connectomic signature for people with high and low fear, high sadness, low anger, and neuroticism with low fear.