Linking the "inner" and "outer" self to mental health and brain networks

Cosimo Agostinelli; Ivan Casanovas; Lochan Chaudhari; Arda Ergin; Pablo Estévez-Gutiérrez; Akanksha Gupta; Juliane T. Moraes; Mario Edoardo Pandolfo; Carlos Gershenson; Haily Merritt; Andreia Sofia Teixeira

arXiv · 2606.27956

Linking the "inner" and "outer" self to mental health and brain networks

Cosimo Agostinelli·Ivan Casanovas·Lochan Chaudhari·Arda Ergin·Pablo Estévez-Gutiérrez·Akanksha Gupta·Juliane T. Moraes·Mario Edoardo Pandolfo·Carlos Gershenson·Haily Merritt·Andreia Sofia Teixeira

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Abstract

How are psychosocial profiles, mental health, and brain functional connectivity related? Studies have been dedicated to unraveling the associations of social support perception and neural functional connectivity. Additionally, personality traits have been explored by examining brain networks. Research on mental health has been developed using a broad range of methods and different approaches. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding how personality traits and social variables are related, and to what extent these components are reflected in brain functional connectivity and mental health outcomes. In this work, we aim to address these complex relations by using data from the Human Connectome Project, both from surveys and resting-state fMRI. The survey data includes personality traits measures and self-reported social support-related variables, which we will refer to as inner- and outer-self, respectively. It also includes data on mental health outcomes. Using z-score standardized measures, we analyze correlation matrices to evaluate the association between the inner- and outer-self domains. Our results show that the social indicators are more evidently grouped by impact on social experience than by the duality of inner-outer selves. Using a $k$-means clustering algorithm, we separate individuals into two groups according to social profiles. When confronting these results with the mental health outcomes, we show that the more socially desirable cluster exhibited a higher score on positive aspects such as life satisfaction and purpose in life. In the functional brain connectivity, we observe that the cluster with a more socially beneficial profile exhibits lower interconnectivity, especially in the default mode network. The pipeline we present uses a combined analysis of both fMRI and psychosocial variables, which could open the path for more extensive analysis.

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Cosimo Agostinelli, Ivan Casanovas, Lochan Chaudhari, Arda Ergin, Pablo Estévez-Gutiérrez, Akanksha Gupta, Juliane T. Moraes, Mario Edoardo Pandolfo, Carlos Gershenson, Haily Merritt, Andreia Sofia Teixeira. 2026-06-26. Linking the "inner" and "outer" self to mental health and brain networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27956

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