Neuroimaging supports behavioral personality assessment: Overlapping activations during reflective and impulsive risk taking

• Behavioral measures of risk taking do not correlate between the BART and GDT.
• Activation patterns of the BART and GDT overlap in the caudate and Insula.
• The BART and GDT differ in their connectivity patterns.

Personality assessment has been challenged by the fact that different assessment methods (implicit measures, behavioral measures and explicit rating scales) show little or no convergence in behavioral studies. In this neuroimaging study we address for the first time, whether different assessment methods rely on separate or overlapping neuronal systems. Fifty nine healthy adult participants completed two objective personality tests of risk propensity: the more implicit Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) and the more explicit Game of Dice Task (GDT). Significant differences in activation, as well as connectivity patterns between both tasks were observed. In both tasks, risky decisions yielded significantly stronger activations than safe decisions in the bilateral caudate, as well as the bilateral Insula. The finding of overlapping brain areas validates different assessment methods, despite their behavioral non-convergence. This suggests that neuroimaging can be an important tool of validation in the field of personality assessment.