cardiac signatures of personality心脏的个性签名.pdfVIP

Cardiac Signatures of Personality Stefan Koelsch*, Juliane Enge, Sebastian Jentschke ¨ Cluster of Excellence ‘‘Languages of Emotion’’, Freie Universitat Berlin, Berlin, Germany Abstract Background: There are well-established relations between personality and the heart, as evidenced by associations between negative emotions on the one hand, and coronary heart disease or chronic heart failure on the other. However, there are substantial gaps in our knowledge about relations between the heart and personality in healthy individuals. Here, we investigated whether amplitude patterns of the electrocardiogram (ECG) correlate with neurotisicm, extraversion, agreeableness, warmth, positive emotion, and tender-mindedness as measured with the Neuroticism-Extraversion- Openness (NEO) personality inventory. Specifically, we investigated (a) whether a cardiac amplitude measure that was previously reported to be related to flattened affectivity (referred to as Ek values) would explain variance of NEO scores, and (b) whether correlations can be found between NEO scores and amplitudes of the ECG. Methodology/Principal Findings: NEO scores and rest ECGs were obtained from 425 healthy individuals. Neuroticism and positive emotion significantly differed between individuals with high and low Ek values. In addition, stepwise cross- validated regressions indicated correlations between ECG amplitudes and (a) agreeableness, as well as (b) positive emotion. Conclusions/Significance: These results are the first to demonstrate that ECG amplitude patterns provide information about the personality of an individual as measured with NEO personality scales and fa