By Alise Gentile
Extravert:
noun
a person who is predominantly focused on external things or social interaction rather than on internal thoughts and feeling.
Extraversion and Dopamine
Socializing, partying, exercising; extroverts have been defined as finding one or more of these activities stimulating. But have you ever wondered why some people enjoy going out and socializing, while others prefer reading and staying in? Recently, studies have provided evidence that there is a relationship between extraversion and dopamine levels found in the brain.
(Left) Brain scan of an extroverted individual.
Background
In order to elaborate on this topic, it is important to understand exactly what dopamine is. Many people hear the word and relate it to the feeling of joy and happiness. While
there is a relationship between dopamine and happiness, dopamine is that driving factor that pushes you to perform an action that induces a happy feeling. Understanding this, it makes sense that extroverts often seek outside simulation, because their unique brain chemistry contains higher dopamine levels, which pushes them to go out and have fun!
Reward Response in Extraverts
According to an article published by “Scientific Reports” (article number 1733) humans with “highly efficient dopamine systems” approach life and the activities they perform with a more optimistic approach since they tend to experience higher reward feelings from the activities they do. For example, let’s say that a particular person (who is an extravert) goes to a bakery and purchases a cupcake. When this individual eats this cupcake, they feel more rewarded and stimulated than an introverted individual would. This leads them to seek out more opportunities to experience this feeling. As discussed in The Neuroscience of You, dopamine responses are stronger in extraverts, resulting in more frequent activation of strong positive emotions. In addition to this, extraverts hold onto the memories of the activity that activated a powerful dopamine response easier than others. Let’s connect these events. When extraverts receive a “reward,” they experience a strong feeling of satisfaction, causing their brain to remember this particular event and motivating them to seek out this response over and over.
Experiments
An experiment conducted by researchers Richard Depue and Yu Fu illustrated a phenomenon called “associative conditioning.” In the experiment, extraverted and introverted presenting individuals were shown video clips and given a drug that stimulated a rewarding feeling (methylphenidate). The extraverts appeared to connect the video to the happy feeling, while the introverts did not. This recognition of the context that provided a happy response is defined as the phenomenon “associated conditioning.” Extraverts demonstrated “contextual facilitation across all measures to video clips.” Furthermore, an experiment conducted by the University of California and published in Nature Neuroscience provides evidence that proposes dopamine pathways leading to the basolateral amygdala (midbrain region associated with emotion) urge the creation of memories associated to these reward feelings, memories that extraverts create easier, as explored earlier.
Benefits
There are multiple reasons that extraverts experiencing higher satisfaction responses may benefit an individual. These dopamine responses can push a more healthy and social lifestyle. According to an article published by Daniel. W. Lai in the “National Library of Medicine,” extraverts tend to go out and move around a lot, “High extraverts are found to prefer highly stimulating social situations (e.g. social gatherings, sports, leisure).” Exercising produces dopamine responses, and has been found by many studies to benefit cardiovascular and mental health (Kelsey Pinckard, Kedryn K. Baskin, and Kristin I. Stanford, “Effects of Exercise to Improve Cardiovascular Health”). Extraverts can also experience lifted moods due to the serotonin surges that come as a response to the dopamine responses from an activity performed by the extravert.
Exercising can improve cardiovascular and mental health.
Understanding Connection
Now that you’ve learned that extroverts have actually been found to display higher dopamine levels, it’s important to understand that having high dopamine levels may not necessarily guarantee you an extroverted personality (or vice versa), but it is still interesting to understand the connection between the two. This discovery on the relationship between dopamine processing and extravertism may lead to even further investigations into how an individual’s personality traits are connected to the physiological aspect of one’s brain. Who knows, this information may even aid future physiological and psychological studies!
Sources
Fischer, R., Lee, A. & Verzijden, M.N. Dopamine genes are linked to Extraversion and Neuroticism personality traits, but only in demanding climates. Sci Rep 8, 1733 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18784-y
Prat, Chantel. The Neuroscience of You
Depue RA, Fu Y. On the nature of extraversion: variation in conditioned contextual activation of dopamine-facilitated effective, cognitive, and motor processes. Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Jun 13;7:288. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00288. PMID: 23785330; PMCID: PMC3682132.
Sias, A.C., Jafar, Y., Goodpaster, C.M. et al. Dopamine projections to the basolateral amygdala drive the encoding of identity-specific reward memories. Nat Neurosci 27, 728–736 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01586-7’
Lai, Daniel W L, and Nan Qin. “Extraversion personality, perceived health and activity participation among community-dwelling aging adults in Hong Kong.” PloS one vol. 13,12 e0209154. 12 Dec. 2018, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0209154
Pinckard, Kelsey et al. “Effects of Exercise to Improve Cardiovascular Health.” Frontiers in cardiovascular medicine vol. 6 69. 4 Jun. 2019, doi:10.3389/fcvm.2019.00069
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