Other neuroimaging studies have implicated right insula activity as related to the personality traits of reward or novelty seeking (Suhara et al., 2001) and neuroticism (Paulus et al., 2003). Activation in this region may be related to individual differences in part by reflecting sympathetic states that differ as a function of personality (e.g., Paulus et al., 2003). The present findings indicate that sensation seeking is the primary personality dimension predicting activation in this region because correlations with the convergent measure of sensation seeking were very strong, and no other personality variables predicted activation in this region when level of sensation seeking was controlled.
