Happy people are always similar: The evidence from brain morphological and functional inter-subject correlations

• Published in: NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Vol. 297; p. 120690
• Main Authors: Li, Zixi, Jiang, Keying, Zhu, Ye, Du, Hanxiao, Im, Hohjin, Zhu, Yingying, Feng, Lei, Zhu, Wenwei, Zhao, Guang, Jia, Xuji, Hu, Ying, Zhu, Haidong, Yao, Qiong, Wang, He, Wang, Qiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 15.08.2024; Elsevier Limited; Elsevier
• Subjects: Aggressive behavior; Amygdala; Anxiety; Attention; Brain research; College students; Face; Face-matching task; Happiness; Information processing; Inter-subject representational similarity analysis; Investigations; Medical imaging; Mental depression; Mood; Morphology; Neuroimaging; Personality; Personality traits; Questionnaires; Social behavior; Substantia grisea; Visual pathways; Visual perception; Inter-subject representational similarity analysis; Happiness; Face-matching task; Amygdala
• ISSN: 1053-8119; 1095-9572; 1095-9572
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2024.120690

•Happiness is divided into two main parts: an individual factor and a social factor.•Happiness mediated the effect of personality on aggression.•Happy people exhibit similar neural activation patterns in visual pathway but not emotional network when processing fearful faces.•Happy people are associated with similar morphological patterns within the DMN, FPN, VIS, and AN. A fundamental question in the study of happiness is whether there is neural evidence to support a well-known hypothesis that happy people are always similar while unfortunate people have their own misfortunes. To investigate this, we employed several happiness-related questionnaires to identify potential components of happiness, and further investigated and confirmed their associations with personality, mood, aggressive behaviors, and amygdala reactivity to fearful faces within a substantial sample size of college students (n = 570). Additionally, we examined the functional and morphological similarities and differences among happy individuals using the inter-subject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA). IS-RSA emphasizes the geometric properties in a high-dimensional space constructed by brain or behavioral patterns and focuses on individual subjects. Our behavioral findings unveiled two factors of happiness: individual and social, both of which mediated the effect of personality traits on individual aggression. Subsequently, mood mediated the impact of happiness on aggressive behaviors across two subgroup splits. Functional imaging data revealed that individuals with higher levels of happiness exhibited reduced amygdala reactivity to fearful faces, as evidenced by a conventional face-matching task (n = 104). Moreover, IS-RSA demonstrated that these participants manifested similar neural activation patterns when processing fearful faces within the visual pathway, but not within the emotional network (e.g., amygdala). Morphological observations (n = 425) indicated that individuals with similar high happiness levels exhibited comparable gray matter volume patterns within several networks, including the default mode network, fronto-parietal network, visual network, and attention network. Collectively, these findings offer early neural evidence supporting the proposition that happy individuals may share common neural characteristics.