University Of Oregon - Latest News Update, Information, Photos & Videos on University Of Oregon at Lokmat Times

A new research may provide you with a clue of what's going on in your friends' brains when they think about you.It turns out that the brain activity patterns found in your friends' brains when they consider your personality traits may be remarkably similar to what is found in your brain when you think of yourself, the study suggests.The results of the following study were published in the 'Journal of Personality and Social Psychology': Attitudes and Social Cognition.The same group of friends will have a different brain activity pattern when they think of someone else in your group - and more in alignment with that person's pattern, findings indicate.It was somewhat surprising to see the close similarity in brain patterns between individuals and their friends, said Dylan Wagner, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University."It didn't have to be that way. We thought it was equally possible that you would think of me in the same way as I think of myself, but the way your brain encodes that information could be totally different," Wagner said.The study was led by Robert Chavez, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, who did the work as a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio StateChavez and Wagner made this finding using a research design that had rarely been used in functional neuroimaging experiments before.They recruited 11 people who were all friends with each other to varying degrees. ("They were a pretty tight-knit group from the same academic program who all spent time together at the university as well as outside of it," Wagner said.)The novel part is that the researchers used a round-robin design in which everyone evaluated each other - and evaluated themselves - on a variety of personality traits, Wagner said.In one session, each participant rated each of the other 10 and themselves on a variety of personality traits in a written questionnaire.In a separate session, the 11 participants conducted similar evaluations while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.The fMRI took images of each person's brain while they completed a task similar to the one they did earlier. They rated each of their friends and themselves on 48 traits, including lonely, sad, cold, lazy, overcritical, trustworthy, enthusiastic, clumsy, fashionable, helpful, smart, punctual and nice.As they expected from previous research, the researchers saw activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain implicated in thinking about the self and close others, as the participants thought about the personality traits of themselves and their friends.The study found that for each participant, the combined brain activity of their friends evaluating them looked a lot like their own brain activity.This suggests that in order to accurately perceive another person, your neural representation of that person - your patterns of brain activity for their identity - has to essentially match the pattern in that persons' brain when they are thinking about themselves, Wagner said.The researchers note, however, that their data only suggest this in aggregate, as the analysis focused on taking the brain patterns of all a person's friends and averaging them together, an approach commonly taken in non-fMRI personality research when comparing friends' consensus judgments of each other.In some ways, that is not surprising, Chavez said."Each one of your friends gets to see a slightly different side of you. When you put them all together, it is a better approximation of how you seen yourself than any one person individually," Chavez said.( With inputs from ANI )

University Of OregonFOLLOW

University of oregon, Latest News

Zebrafish need to learn to trust their instincts in order to socialize. According to recent University of Oregon zebrafish ... ...

By studying the visual system of an octopus, researchers hope to understand how its brain organization compares to that ... ...

Let's pretend it's the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 to 100 million years ago. We've got dinosaurs roaming the land and odd-looking early species of birds, although the shark as we know it is already swimming in the prehistoric oceans which cover 82% o ...

Researchers from California Polytechnic State University and the University of Oregon during a recent study examined the potential benefits for firms and consumers of pick-your-price (PYP) over pay-what-you-want (PWYW) and fixed pricing strategies. ...

The Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated screenwriter and producer Allan Burns has passed away. He was 85 when he breathed his last. ...

Parent's choices of food can be a contributing factor in deciding what meals they serve to their children and how the kids develop their food preferences, according to a new study from the University of Oregon. ...

Announcing further alterations to its provisional 2020 calendar due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis, the Diamond League on Friday said that meetings in Paris and Eugene will not take place this year while the event in Gateshead has been postponed. ...

A new research may provide you with a clue of what's going on in your friends' brains when they think about you. ...