Psychological scales in the brain: Trait-linked questionnaire items evoke similar neural patterns in the mPFC

Abstract

Self-report questionnaires are widely used across psychology and related disciplines, yet the cognitive and neural processes underlying how individuals generate responses to such items remain poorly understood. Here, we investigated whether items from the same psychological scale evoke similar neural activation patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a region consistently implicated in self-referential processing. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants completed a self-reference task in which they judged how well 72 personality-related questionnaire items (e.g., from the Big Five, emotion regulation, and well-being scales) described themselves. Using representational similarity analysis (RSA), we found that items from the same scale elicited more similar multivoxel activation patterns in the mPFC compared to items from different scales. This effect was specific to the self-reference task and was not observed during a semantic judgment control task using the same items. Furthermore, the mPFC encoded not only categorical scale membership but also graded psychological similarity among scales, as reflected in inter-scale behavioral correlations. Importantly, these effects remained significant even after controlling for sentence-level semantic similarity using multiple regression RSA, indicating that the observed neural structure reflects psychological rather than linguistic similarity. These findings suggest that the mPFC integrates internally constructed evidence in a construct-sensitive manner during self-report, and they open new avenues for linking psychological assessment with neural representation. We discuss the implications for understanding self-report as a cognitive process and for future work on neuroimaging-informed scale validation. Significance statementSelf-report questionnaires are widely used across psychology, medicine, and public policy to assess thoughts, feelings, and personality traits. However, little is known about how the brain generates these responses. Using fMRI and a multivariate analysis approach, we found that questionnaire items measuring the same psychological construct evoked similar activity patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex--a region involved in self-reflection. This effect was specific to self-referential judgments and remained significant even after controlling for sentence-level semantic similarity, suggesting that the brain organizes information according to underlying psychological traits rather than linguistic features. These findings offer new insights into how self-report operates at the neural level and may inform future approaches to scale development.