Hardwired for happiness: neural correlates of positive affect and Its associations with socioemotional functioning and personality

Abstract

Although positive affect plays a key role in psychological well-being, its stable, trait-like expression remains poorly understood at the neural level. Furthermore, while extensive behavioural research has linked higher trait positive affect to better socioemotional outcomes and certain personality domains, relatively little is known about the brain mechanisms underlying these associations. Thus, this study examined structural and functional brain correlates of trait positive affect in healthy young adults and assessed their associations with socioemotional functioning and personality. The SPRENG dataset was used to perform vertex-wise analysis on cortical thickness and network-based statistics on resting-state functional connectivity, with positive affect as the predictor. Higher positive affect was associated with reduced cortical thickness in the bilateral rostral middle frontal gyrus, right supramarginal gyrus, and left precuneus. Functional connectivity analysis revealed a significant network of 58 edges, including positive default mode–somatomotor and frontoparietal–subcortical connectivity, and negative somatomotor–ventral attention connectivity. This network showed robust associations with well-being, perceived stress, self efficacy, social relationships, sadness, neuroticism, and extraversion, while structural results showed fewer but overlapping correlations. Overall, these findings identify a multimodal neural profile of positive affect, highlighting that intrinsic brain organisation supports personality and socioemotional factors which facilitate well-being in emerging adulthood.