Extroverts love being among people because of the way their brains react to human faces

Some of us are social and others are shy and prefer being alone.

Some are hardworking while others are lazy and unorganized. In fact, the way people act in certain situations, the decisions they make, the way they treat others or behave come as a result of their character. And as we know every man and woman (and child as well) has their own unique character.

However, according to psychologists, different people who also have different characters exhibit the same or similar groups of traits when acting in particular ways. That discovery has helped them to define several personality types based on the important ways in which people are different from each other and on the behaviors that define these differences.

For instance, the ones who belong to the extroverted personality type are very social.

They love spending time in the company of many people and cannot live without their friends. On the other end of the spectrum are the introverts who avoid crowded places and prefer their own company. Numerous studies have also revealed that people who are extroverted tend to be more confident, more positive and more successful.

In addition to that, according to another significant study, human faces are far more important for the extraverted part of humanity than for the people who belong to other personality types, especially for introverts.

The results of the research reveal that the brains of extroverts are programmed to notice human faces more often than the brains of introverts.

Actually, it turns out that introverts’ brains are not capable of detecting the difference between a face and an inanimate object.

This discovery could also explain why extroverts crave the company of other people while introverts prefer their own.

It also adds weight to the belief that variations in the brains of different individuals could determine their personality. 

“This is just one more piece of evidence to support the assertion that personality is not merely a psychology concept,” stated Inna Fishman, of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, Calif, who conducted the study “There’s some broader foundation for the behavior that you see … implicating that there are neural bases for different personality types,” she added.

In the study, carried out by Fishman and her team, participated 28 people aged 18 to 40. They all had different personality types – from introverted to moderately extroverted to very extroverted.

To conduct the experiment the researchers placed Electrodes on the participants’ scalps. Then they recorded the electrical activity in their brains, a method which is called electroencephalography, or EEG.

The researchers were interested in one specific electrical activity of the brain called P300. It is important to specify that P300 is related to human attention. And also indicates how fast someone’s brain could notice a change.

Changes in someone’s EEG can be achieved by making this person perform specific tasks or by unexpectedly transforming the environment. For instance, producing loud noise in a quiet room. The brains’ reaction happens in around 300 milliseconds before the person becomes conscious of the change.

To provoke P300, the researchers performed the so-called “oddball task”. This method consists of making people see a series of similar images. For instance, someone shows several white T-shirts, and then unexpectedly, the slightly different picture of a pink T-shirt appears.

During the experiment conducted by Fisher and her team, the participants saw several male faces and then suddenly a female face was shown. The participants also had to look at pictures of purple flowers changed not so often with pictures of yellow ones.

According to the final results, extroverts had greater P300 response to human faces and introverts had very similar P300 responses to both human faces and to flowers.

“They just didn’t place a larger weight on social stimuli than they did on any other stimuli, of which flowers are one example,” Fishman concluded.

“This supports the claim that introverts, or their brains, might be indifferent to people. They can take them or leave them, so to speak. The introvert’s brain treats interactions with people the same way it treats encounters with other, non-human information, such as inanimate objects for example,” Fishman explained to LiveScience.

The findings of the study were announced at the 118th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

These results reveal that human faces (and therefore people in general) are much more important for extroverts than for introverts.

Obviously, the reason for that lies in the differences that exist between the functioning of the brains of these two groups of people.