Fig. 2: vmPFC anatomy is linked to social lifestyle markers of social, personality, and demographic traits with sex-differentiated population effects.

During midlife, regions of the mPFC have been found to show an accelerated decline in gray matter structure (cf. introduction). For the sake of illustration, the marginal posterior population distributions from our vmPFC analysis are depicted using raincloud plots (1 of the 36 region-by-region analyses that we have conducted on the UK Biobank). We reveal to what extent vmPFC region volume is specifically explained by the 40 examined lifestyle traits at the population level (cf. Supplementary Data 1). The half violin plots show the posterior parameter distributions of the specific contributions of each single trait to vmPFC volume, not explained by the other traits, in middle-aged men and women. The boxplots and scatterplots underneath depict the probabilistic parameter guesses that together form the marginal posterior distributions. Each brain-behavior HPDI communicates three kinds of information: direction (e.g., a positive parameter value indicates a tendency for a higher brain volume in the presence of that particular trait), magnitude (e.g., a parameter mean further above or below zero indicates a bigger dependence of region volume on that particular trait), and certainty (e.g., a narrower interval indicates that the model is more sure about the estimated direction and magnitude of a particular brain-behavior effect). For middle-aged women, satisfaction with health contributed most to explaining vmPFC region volume. In contrast, for middle-aged men, earning a higher job income explained most vmPFC gray matter volume. Error bars/dispersion shows uncertainty of Bayesian posterior parameter distributions. Source data are provided in Supplementary Data 3.