Scientists, who studied the link between personality and brain structure, have identified a key area of the brain that makes someone a 'people person', a finding that may lead to a cure for those with difficulties in social interaction.

A group of researchers from Cambridge University in collaboration with Oulu University, Finland, tried to seek answer to a common trait in humans: Why is it that some of us really enjoy the company of others while some people are detached and independent? They analysed the relationship between social reward dependence and the concentration of grey matter (brain-cell containing tissue) in different brain regions.

The researchers led by Mal Lebreton from the Cambridge Department of Psychiatry discovered that the reason why someone is a 'people-person' may depend on the structure of his brain. According to the study, the greater the concentration of brain tissue in certain parts of the brain, the more likely the person is likely to be a warm, sentimental person. In the study on 41 male volunteers, who underwent a brain scan using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), it was found that the greater the concentration of tissue in the orbitofrontal cortex (the outer strip of the brain just above the eyes), and in the ventral striatum (a deep structure in the centre of the brain), the higher they tended to score on the social reward dependence measure.

According to the research, which is published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, the same region of the brain is linked to processing of pleasures such as sweet tastes and sexual stimuli.

Graham Murray, who was one of the lead researchers, said "Sociability and emotional warmth are very complex features of our personality". "It's interesting that the degree to which we find social interaction rewarding relates to the structure of our brains in regions that are important for very simple biological drives such as food, sweet liquids and sex," he said. "Perhaps this gives us a clue to how complex features like sentimentality and affection evolved from structures that in lower animals originally were only important for basic biological survival processes," Murray was quoted as saying by Eurekalert.

However, he warned that this research is only correlation and cross-sectional and cannot prove that brain structure determines personality. "It could even be that your personality, through experience, helps in part to determine your brain structure," Murray cautioned. The finding of the landmark research could lead to new insights into psychiatric disorders where difficulties in social interaction are prominent, such as autism or schizophrenia. "Patients with certain psychiatric conditions often experience difficulties in feeling emotional closeness, and this can have a big impact on their life. It could be that the cause of these difficulties is at least partly due to brain structural features of those disorders," said Murray.