Red lenses

Most people thing of their personality as being more positive and having fewer less negative traits than other people. Now, US scientists have used MRI to show that apparently the less you use your brain's frontal lobes, the more you perceive your behaviour through rose-tinted spectacles. They publish details in the February issue of the journal NeuroImage.

Researchers have previously found a link between how we see ourselves and activity in the parts of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulated cortex (PCC). People, however, are notoriously inept at making judgements about their own character; they tend to see themselves through rose-tinted spectacles.

Jennifer Beer, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, graduate student Brent Hughes, and their colleagues explain that the natural human tendency is to see oneself in a positive light. This can be helpful and motivating for the individual but can be detrimental to others in some circumstances, Beer explains. She and Hughes have now conducted research at the university's Imaging Research Center that could offer new insights into the relationship between brain functions and the human emotions and perceptions that those functions produce.

To investigate this phenomenon, the team asked twenty volunteers to answer questions about how they compared to their peers in terms of modesty levels, their tact and diplomacy skills, their maturity, likability and also in terms of negative characteristics such as materialism, messiness, lack of reliability or narrow-mindedness. All the while, the subjects were being scanned.

The team found that those people who viewed themselves in a very positive light across those disparate areas used their orbitofrontal cortex less than the other subjects. This region of the frontal lobe is generally associated with reasoning, planning, decision-making and problem-solving

Some subjects who had accurate views of themselves showed four times more frontal lobe activation than the most extreme of those people who figuratively wore personal "rose-coloured spectacles" and perceived themselves to be better than their peers in various respects.

The team also found that in a separate group of subjects who were asked the same questions, those who were required to answer the questions faster also saw themselves in a far more positive light than those who had much longer to think about their responses. Those findings suggest that processing information in a more deliberate manner may be the way in which frontal lobe activation permits people to come to more realistic conclusions; to remove the "red lenses" one might say.

"Subjects made unrealistically positive judgments about themselves more quickly, suggesting these judgments require fewer mental resources," Beer says. "Perhaps, like the visual system, the social judgment system is designed to give us a quick 'good enough' perception for the sake of efficiency."

The team concedes that, "it is important to note that at the level of a particular personality trait, it is difficult to distinguish between participants who make self-?attering evaluations and participants who truly stand out on that characteristic." Not everyone who thinks positively of themselves is using a rosy filter, in other words.

The work could help scientists better understand brain functions in seniors or people who suffer from depression or other mental illnesses. It could also have implications for addicts of drugs of abuse, such as methamphetamine, whose frontal lobes are often damaged by drug use and who can apparently misjudge their ability to stay clean.

"In healthy people, the more you activate a portion of your frontal lobes, the more accurate your view of yourself is," says Beer. The less you use those rationalising lobes, the more you view yourself as desirable as or better than your peers.

In the study, the team had manipulated the subject self inflation with how much traits permitted self-serving definitions so that each person in the study gave them a rose-coloured view in one condition but less so in the other. "This allowed us to compare and see what goes on in the brain in relation to rose colour," Beer told SpectroscopyNOW. "This also gets around the issue that these randomly selected people are somehow special. If they are, then why in only one of our conditions?"

Beer also points out that they have found this effect using a number of different approaches. For example, people who are missing their orbitofrontal cortex show the most rosy coloration of their judgements compared with healthy controls and people who have other kinds of brain damage.

The views represented in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.