Regional gray matter density is associated with morningness–eveningness: Evidence from voxel-based morphometry

Abstract

Diurnal preference (morningness-eveningness) is known to be associated with several individual characteristics that are important in the fields of sociology, education, and psychiatry. Despite this importance, the anatomical correlates of individual differences in morningness-eveningness are unknown, and these were investigated in the present study. We used voxel-based morphometry and a questionnaire to determine individual morningness-eveningness and its association with brain structures in 432 healthy men and 344 healthy women (age, 20.7±1.8years). We demonstrated that morningness (less eveningness) was associated with (a) lower regional gray matter density (rGMD) in the precuneus and adjacent areas, (b) lower rGMD in the left posterior parietal cortex and adjacent areas, and (c) higher rGMD in the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex. Further, our exploratory analyses revealed that (d) higher rGMD in hypothalamic areas around the bilateral suprachiasmatic nuclei were associated with morningness. These findings demonstrate that variations in morningness-eveningness reflect the GM structures of focal regions across the cortex, and suggest a structural basis for individual morningness-eveningness and its association with a wide range of psychological variables distributed across different GM areas of the brain.

Differences in gray matter structure correlated to nationalism and patriotism

“…However, the fact that our study has a larger statistical power alone indicates that our finding is more reliable than other research in the field even when the reported P value is the same. Nonetheless, the lack of a strong (or midlevel) correlation between cognition and brain structures of any one area in analyses of a large sample of young adults is a widely seen phenomenon 39 62 63 64 . This phenomenon may suggest that at least in this group, it is difficult to reliably estimate cognitive differences from any one area of one brain image.…”

“…Preprocessing of the structural data was performed using Statistical Parametric Mapping software (SPM8; Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, London, UK) implemented in Matlab (Mathworks Inc., Natick, MA, USA). Using a previously described method 39 involving a new segmentation algorithm implemented in SPM8, the diffeomorphic anatomical registration through exponentiated lie algebra (DARTEL) registration process implemented in SPM8, images were spatially normalized to the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) space to give images with 1.5 × 1.5 × 1.5 mm 3 voxels. Subsequently, all images were smoothed by convolving them with an isotropic Gaussian kernel of 12 mm full width at half maximum (FWHM) for the reasons described below.…”

Global associations between regional gray matter volume and diverse complex cognitive functions: evidence from a large sample study

“…In addition to low effect size and statistical power, it is also possible that the multiple areas showing significant associations with CCA in different studies are in fact functionally associated with diverse CCAs. A series of recent studies using huge sample sizes (N > several hundred) of young adults showed that associations between individual aspects of cognition and regional gray matter structure were generally low 16 . Moreover, our previous study on simple processing speed involving several hundred subjects showed that performance was positively correlated with widespread regional white matter volume (rWMV) across different simple processing speed tasks; furthermore, the strengths of the associations were generally low and no single area showed significant specific correlations between rWMV and simple processing speed 17 .…”

Neural correlates of dynamic changes in working memory performance during one night of sleep deprivation

“…Chronotype‐specificity refers to individual preferences in sleep and wakefulness that reflect endogenous, self‐sustained genetic dispositions (Roenneberg & Merrow, ). Chronotypes have been found to be associated with differences in white matter integrity and gray matter density (Rosenberg, Maximov, Reske, Grinberg, & Shah, ; Takeuchi et al, ). Additionally, chronotype‐specific cerebral responses to language processing and attention also have been found (Reske, Rosenberg, Plapp, Kellermann, & Shah, ; Rosenberg, Reske, Warbrick, & Shah, ).…”