Free Experiment On : Do Extraverts Process Social Stimuli Differently From Introverts? Research Paper Sample

Carl Jung a psychologist by profession introduced a term to describe the personality of a person whose actions and intentions are inwardly directed. These people are engrossed in their own ideas, concepts and thoughts and maintain very limited contact with outside world, these people are called introverts. Likewise Carl Jung also introduced another term to describe the personality traits of person whose actions and intentions are outwardly directed. They are highly prone to external environment, very social, comfortable in social gathering, make friends readily and are largely involved in outside world, these people are called extroverts. An experimental study has been carried out to understand the difference in societal stimuli between these two types of personalities.
The behavioral or personality characteristics of extrovert people are largely associated with the brain network system responsible to control the sensitivity to signals and cues to certain reward and ultimately generate in response to it an appropriate approach behavior. However very limited information is available about the neural circuits of extrovert people that are responsive to stimuli received from society provided the fact they are very social. The experiment is based on the methodology of ERP to illustrate that the difference in the dimension of extroversion is connected with the level of enhanced attention that has been evoked by a social stimuli. People who are highly extrovert are significantly linked to ERPs P300 component with maximum amplitudes that are provoked by human facial expression. The results have reflected that increased level of motivational significance is carried by social stimuli for the extrovert people. It has also been stated that difference in personalities is due difference in the neural retorts to the social stimuli.
The electrophysiological guides provided by activities of brain such as ERPs are experimented to answer this query, as these techniques directly estimate the retorts generated by brain in response to distinct stimuli. Concisely, ERPs are resulting from (EEG) with the help of sign averaging, and are supposed to ascend from the synchronous actions of neuronal populations involved in analysis of available data. P300 among all other ERP identified component is considered as the indicator of cognitive operations related to expectancy and is very helpful in determining, if the neural circuits of extrovert people is more sensitive to external or social stimuli compared to that of introvert people.
The sample of this study consist of 28 mentally and physically healthy adults from 18years to 40 years and 15 were the females. Participants were enlisted to become a part of a current multicenter study program and curtained to drop the history of CNS syndrome or injury, existing or previous psychiatric conditions, and effect of current medical treatment on CNS. In the study, the average was taken for the number of years spent by participants in their formal education. The result obtained from such an average came out to be 13.5 years hence the SD was taken to be 1.4. The ethnic composition of the sample in this study was very much diverse, with around 43% people reporting the ethnicity of them as the Caucasian, 11% as the Hispanic, 35% as the Asian-American, 7% as the African- American, and less than 4% as the Native American.
In the experiment conducted during this study, a P300-eliciting type of “oddball” task had been designed in order to assess that whether, in an individual having high extraversion level, the human faces induce higher level of attention distribution which simply means that elicit larger than P300 as a response to the oddball targets than as compared to nonsocial; however, otherwise similar, the visual stimuli. As reviewed in the study, the standard oddball related experiment required that the stimuli can be clearly categorized into two major distinct categories for instance high vs low tone pitches, X vs O letters etc. One of these categories is presented in this experiment more vividly and as stated by the author it is around 80% successful in the case of trials. The experiment suggested that such an unlikely probability of one category against the other shows large P300 levels as the response to the infrequent oddball stimuli. This situation signifies an enhanced allocation of resources for the unlikely event. This reliable experimental design can be utilized for various categories like face pictures for males and females, social conditions and flower colors. These can be categorized as nonsocial; however, equally complex type of visual controlling condition being used. The results show that the participants’ Total Extraversion level ranged between 35 and 73 that represents a large spectrum of Extraversion.
The main findings of the study can be narrated as the difference in the dimension of extrovert people is deeply linked to the level of attention that has been evoked by any external or social stimuli. People who have scored high on the degree of extroversion have higher attention allocation index i.ie. (P300 to eccentric/ oddball targets) to human facial expression. The research study narrated that faces of highly extrovert people have higher level of motivational significance. Prominently, flower (nonsocial) and face (social) stimuli seemed to operate with similar consistency in unlike blocks. The essential variation between the two kinds of stimuli was considered as the presumed nonexistence of individual relevance of nonsocial to that of social to that of participants through various stages of extraversion. These two categories of stimulus have different rewarding and motivational significant for the extrovert people, and thus were anticipated to provoke variant P300 amplitude extrovert individuals.
The research study has revealed that high P300 amplitude for extrovert people in retort to social oddball stimuli verifies the concept that human facial expressions are of vital importance for extrovert people, however this finding doesn’t apply to nonsocial oddball stimuli, in contrast to other pictorial stimuli with corresponding stimulus characteristics and rate of happening. In contrast, smaller P300 scales in introverts in retorts to faces propose that human facial expressions are not predominantly attention seizing sort of pictorial evidence for these people. Generally, these findings propose that the friendliness illustrating extraverts, as well as pleasure of social happenings and partiality for social relations over being isolated ,may be related with enriched handing out of social stimuli, possibly due to a sensitive intrinsic emotional implication that this type of stimuli offers to extraverts. Prominently, this consequence does not simplify to all groups of pictorial stimuli, as verified by nonexistence of this type of link between P300 and extroversion provoked by nonsocial pictorial stimuli.
In nutshell, it can be said that findings support the concept of disparity in neurobiological procedures related with two discrete personality profiles categorized by social tactic and social extraction. Though a fundamental association cannot be drawn from these findings (it is uncertain whether individual’s extraversion/introversion may lead to detailed modifications in neural integrated circuit via diverse lifetime practices, more or less social interaction, or whether differential brain integrated circuit governs individual’s extraversion), these results propose that individual variances in character are connected to significant individual variances in neural retorts to societal stimuli. Forthcoming investigation may use this procedure to further discover the influence of inherent biology vs. the collective consequence of experience on personality growth throughout earlier life phases.
Lastly, assumed the current proof of LC-NE system participation in generation of P300, it is plausible that this method might be associated in the expression of the character aspect descriptively taken as extraversion. Though exceedingly hypothetical, it might be valuable seeing the prospect that P300 might assist as an evaluation of the processing conduits supporting the prejudice of extrovert people to pursuing and appreciating social relations. Therefore, being exposed for a few hundred milliseconds to a societal stimulus, the nervous system is giving along a gesture that is steady with discrepancy in social patterns captured by the character attribute of extraversion. Extraverts signal is prejudiced towards permitting favored access to the restricted pool of resources to get attentive, whereas in introverts the social stimuli are not given such favored position. Therefore, provided the presently debated LC-NE proposition of P300 etiology and the changeability of P300 provoked by societal stimuli perceived along the continuum of extraversion in the contemporary study, the LC-NE system might provide another essential clarification for the variation in nervous system role between extraverts compared to that of introverts, possibly inventing with general stimulation, as it has been recommended by early character philosophers.

Works Cited

Fishman, I., Ng, R., & Bellugi, U. (2011). Do extraverts process social stimuli differently from introverts? Cogn Neurosci, 67-73.