Understanding the personal values of youths is an extremely important issue, considering the prominent role of personal values in predicting a variety of psychological constructs in youth, such as personality traits (Fischer and Boer, 2015), identity (Lee et al., 2010), and behavior (McDonald et al., 2015). Personal value is defined by most researchers as a broad, ideal, and cross-situational goal (Rokeach, 1973; Schwartz, 1992). Individuals set the order of their values in terms of their relative importance, forming a hierarchy of values (Sagiv and Schwartz, 2022). Interindividual differences in value hierarchies are prevalent both within and across societies (Brosch et al., 2011; Sagiv and Schwartz, 2022), reflecting unique genetic heritage, personal experiences, social structure, and culture (Rokeach, 1973; Schwartz, 1992). Tradition, for example, could be highly valued in Eastern cultures but not in Western ones. For some, it could be the most important thing in their value hierarchy, but not for others.

The basic personal values theory is the theatrical framework of this study. Regarding personal value content, this theory has evolved from the original 10 basic personal values (Schwartz, 1992) to the refined 19 (Schwartz et al., 2012), see Figure 1. These values are likely to be universal since they were conceptually drawn from three universal requests of human existence: “needs of individuals as biological organisms, requisites of coordinated social interaction, and survival and welfare needs of groups” (Schwartz, 1992, p. 4). The structure of value hierarchy is another focus of the basic personal values theory. Schwartz et al. (2012) visualized social and psychological conflict or congruity between values in a circular structure, known as the circumplex model of values (see Figure 1). The array of values represents a motivational continuum, i.e., values placed next to each other have more compatible motivations, whereas those placed further apart are more conflicting. Empirically, Schwartz (1992) identified two motivational conflicts and theorized two pairs of higher-order value dimensions: openness to change (readiness for new ideas, actions, and experiences) versus conservation (self-restriction, order, and avoiding change), self-enhancement (pursuing one’s interests) versus self-transcendence (transcending one’s interests for the sake of others).

Social cognitive neuroscience provides a more intuitive analytical perspective in terms of revealing the neural correlations of personal values. Personal values are an important component of the self (Sagiv and Schwartz, 2022) and are easily associated with the self-related brain areas, with the dorsal/ventral/anteromedial medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC/VMPFC/AMPFC), the anterior/posterior cingulate cortex (ACC/PCC), and the insula featuring most prominently. For instance, participants showed stronger blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals in the VMPFC and DMPFC (Leszkowicz et al., 2021), as well as in MPFC and ACC (Teed et al., 2020) when rating self-transcendence values as opposed to self-enhancement values. Research on health behavior change found that self-transcendence values priming upregulated the activity of VMPFC, which predicted later decreases in sedentary behavior (Kang et al., 2018). Similarly, increased activation in VMPFC was observed when individuals with self-transcendence values were envisioning far-future events (Brosch et al., 2018). Additionally, Brosch et al. (2012) found that the distributed activation pattern in the insula and ACC allowed differentiating growth-type (self-transcendence and openness to change values) and protection-type values (self-enhancement and conservation values).

Qin et al. (2020) proposed that the neural model of self-processing involved three levels of interoceptive-processing, exteroceptive-processing, and mental-self-processing, among which the mental-self-processing involved MPFC and ACC and other extensive brain regions. A dorsal–ventral component of self- and other-reflection within the MPFC was observed in the literature; in particular, VMPFC are active for self-related (include close other) processing, while DMPFC are active for other- referential processing, more accurately for public other (for a review, see Denny et al., 2012; Murray et al., 2012). In this sense, previous findings imply that the concern for the interests of close people (benevolence value) and strangers (universal value) expressed by self-transcendence values are represented at the brain level by brain regions of self-related processing and public other-processing, respectively. The insula cortex, which is frequently co-activated with the ACC, is crucial for organizing behavior by combining external elements about stimuli with internal information about individual motivation, cognitive and self-awareness (Craig, 2009; Davey et al., 2016; Frewen et al., 2020). Interoceptive-, exteroceptive- and mental-self-processing all three levels involve insula activation, highlighting the basic role of internal-sensory signal integration in self-processing (Qin et al., 2020). Overall, the findings of task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) studies imply that as motivationally goals anchored in the self-schema, personal values are broadly associated with the brain regions of mental-self-processing (e.g., MPFC and ACC), and even interoceptive processing (e.g., insula) to exert its driving force for decisions and behaviors.

Presently, known personal value-related neuroscience studies are based primarily on variable-centered analyses wherein the biological indicators of personal values are revealed on the premise of sample homogeneity. Adding to this complexity, sample heterogeneity may contribute to the neural correlates of personal value in the overall sample, which may differ markedly from such correlations within some or all subgroups. Furthermore, the variable-centered approach is weak in identifying interindividual differences. Interindividual differences can easily be linked to taxonomic approaches. The person-centered method, as a worthy supplement to the traditional variable-centered perspective, focuses on organizing and integrating value hierarchies within individuals and abstractly systematizing individuals into an efficient categorization system of value hierarchies (Magun et al., 2016). Using a person-centered typological approach to identify heterogeneity within groups in terms of value hierarchies has yielded compelling results (e.g., Magun et al., 2016; Smack et al., 2017; Ungvary et al., 2018). Various statistical methods such as cluster analyses (Lee et al., 2011; Magun et al., 2016) and latent profile (class) analyses (LPA and PCA) (Moors and Vermunt, 2007; Magun et al., 2016; Ungvary et al., 2018) have been used to implement the typological approach in empirical studies, which identified two to five distinct heterogeneous groups with similar value hierarchy characteristics. For instance, researchers identified 5 subgroups in 29 European countries, namely “growth, weak person focus, strong person focus, weak social focus, and strong social focus” (Magun et al., 2016); 4 subgroups, namely anxiety-free, other-focused, self-focused, and undifferentiated in American and Israeli adolescents (Ungvary et al., 2018); and 2 subgroups, namely personal-focused and social-focused in Canadian college students (Smack et al., 2017). One explanation for the different numbers of subgroups is the different distribution of people in different countries (Magun et al., 2016; Iijima et al., 2020). These results highlight that the typological approach, as an appropriate strategy, can add valuable insights into taxonomy within and across countries.

In sum, despite existing value-related neuroscience research, the neural correlates of interindividual differences in value hierarchies have not been holistically considered. This study aims to characterize the individual difference in value hierarchies based on Schwartz’s theory and examines the potential neural correlates across these individual difference. Most empirical studies on the neural correlates of personal values mainly focus on populations in Western culture, where individualism flourishes. Some gaps, nevertheless, remain among those in Eastern culture that thrives on collectivism (Hofstede, 2001; Huang et al., 2019), especially among young people. In Chinese society, rapid economic development and urbanization in the past decades catalyzed the coexistence and integration of various values, with the characteristics of pluralistic construction, especially among the younger generation (Chen, 2015). Thus, Chinese emerging adults are a perfect fit for interindividual differences in value hierarchies owing to the prominent intragenerational and intergenerational differences in their value hierarchies. LPA was employed to characterize the different personal value profiles among Chinese emerging adults for achieving the first aim.

Schwarz’s personal values theory is based on universal human needs, and studies from approximately 100 nations support the near-universality of basic values content and circular order in this theory (Sagiv and Schwartz, 2022). This widespread cross-cultural acceptance may imply that values convey motives that have been evolutionarily conserved, reflected as innate individual differences in the brain (Zacharopoulos et al., 2016). Task-independent measures taken at rest can predict individual differences in brain level (Tavor et al., 2016). During rest, spontaneous brain dynamics maintain and optimize the brain’s generative models, providing top-down predictive signals for cognition and action in future interactions (Pezzulo et al., 2021). As broad goals across contexts, personal values are people’s guiding principles (Schwartz et al., 2012). Behavioral empirical research that reveals the effect of personal values on psychological constructs such as cognitive, emotional, and decision-making (for a review, see Sagiv and Schwartz, 2022) have validated this top-down guidance. If this is indeed the case, then individual differences in the value hierarchy may be reflected by differences in spontaneous fluctuations within and across brain regions during brain rest states. The former can be measured by the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF), a neuroimaging indicator of regional spontaneous neuronal activity (Zang et al., 2007; Gong et al., 2020); and the latter by the resting-state functional connectivity (FC), a neuroimaging indicator that captures the complex correlations in neural activity between brain regions, regardless of their spatial proximity (Power et al., 2011; Schaefer et al., 2018). This two robust dynamics indicators are sensitive to psychological differences in the neuropsychological literature (e.g., Wei et al., 2014; Simon et al., 2020). Thus, resting-state fMRI was employed, as well as ALFF and resting-state FC were analyzed to examine the neural correlates of different personal value profiles for achieving the second goal of this study.

Personal values are the core component of the self (Sagiv and Schwartz, 2022). Value hierarchies are critically involved in the organization of one’s self-schema (Brosch et al., 2012; Zacharopoulos et al., 2016). This theoretical anticipation, along with converging aforementioned variable-centered results regarding the neural correlates of personal values led us to expect that the spontaneous fluctuations within and across brain regions related to the self-schema, such as prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, and insular cortex may allow differentiating personal value profiles. Thus, the prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, and insular cortex were chosen as 3 regions of interest (ROIs) to enhance the power of the study.

From a typology perspective, the present study characterized the personal value profiles of Chinese emerging adults using LPA. The LPA results revealed three heterogeneous personal value profiles, supporting the pluralistic construction and intragenerational differentiation of contemporary Chinese emerging adults’ value hierarchy. Specifically, a value profile (profile 1) consistent with Chinese cultural values was found and labeled as traditional social orientation. In this profile, self-transcendence and conservation were highly prioritized, while self-enhancement and openness to change were at the bottom of the value hierarchy. This reflects the collectivistic value in traditional Chinese culture, that is, emphasis on harmonious relationships and hierarchical order, valuing stability over freedom, groups and family over individuals, encouraging undemonstrative and unassuming behavior (King and Bond, 1985; Cai et al., 2010; Zeng and Greenfield, 2015). Individuals in profile 2 prioritized openness to change, and thus, this profile was labeled as modernized orientation. This is consistent with the research findings of Zeng and Greenfield (2015) wherein individualist values were continuously enhanced by analyzing the frequency of individualist words used by the Chinese people. According to the theory of social change and human development by Greenfield (2009), urbanization and modernization may result in the alteration of cultural values in an individualistic direction. Indeed, Chinese society has become increasingly market-oriented and modernized, and modern oriented values have gradually been accepted by people, especially the younger generations (Chen and Chen, 2010; Zeng and Greenfield, 2015). Schools and parents also began to encourage students to develop independence, self-expression, and self-exploration, which were ignored in traditional Chinese culture (Way et al., 2013).

Critically, the third and largest profile (72%) that emerged was labeled as undifferentiated orientation because of its moderate endorsement of all four values. This result contradicted Schwartz’s theoretical hypothesis that the more two distant values are in direction in the value circle, the more antagonistic they are. However, this was consistent with the “pluralistic construction” of value hierarchies observed in Chinese college students (Heim et al., 2017). These results indicate that traditional values with strong cultural roots are still alive among the youth in China, despite the growing emphasis on individual goal realization and self-expression (Chen, 2015). Additionally, this pluralistic construction of value hierarchies is easily associated with the dialectical thinking in the self among the Chinese people (Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2004, 2009). Individuals with such thinking styles tend to assume and accept the existence of contradictions (Peng and Nisbett, 1999). Thus, dialectical thinking may make the Chinese youth more receptive to these two values with conflicting basic motivations.

We further identified the neural indicators for the heterogeneous profiles employing resting-state fMRI. In the resting state, the neural activity differences across personal value profiles were observed in the insula rather than in the PFC and ACC, which is not totally compatible with the task state fMRI literature. Specifically, spontaneous activity in the right PI was stronger in Chinese emerging adults with modernized orientation than in those with undifferentiated orientation. Furthermore, for spontaneous activity in the right PI, a significant positive association was found for self-enhancement and a negative trend toward significance for self-transcendence. These results are consistent with previous studies wherein activation patterns in the PI were revealed to be possible classifiers that distinguish between growth-type core values (e.g., self-transcendence and openness to change) and protection-type core values (e.g., self-enhancement and conservation) (Brosch et al., 2012). Given that the PI, as a zone of convergence for interoceptive information, plays a role in detecting salience (Craig, 2009) and anticipating loss (Canessa et al., 2013), one possible explanation is that stronger attention to self-related needs for individuals with high self-enhancement is associated with high sensitivity to subjective sensations at the neurophysiological level. A positive association between high competitive achievement motivation and right PI grey matter density was observed in a VBM study (Takeuchi et al., 2014) that supports this inference. One may speculate that in the resting state, spontaneous activity in the low-level brain system responsible for visceral sensations may be the neurologically encoded expression of fundamental concerns about self-needs or others’ needs. However, given the relatively small effect size, this analysis should be considered exploratory and needs to be replicated.

The results showed a stronger FC of the MI with the ITG, TG, and POC in Chinese emerging adults with traditional social orientation than in those with modernized orientation and undifferentiated orientation. Furthermore, the FC of the right MI with the right TG was positively correlated with conservation value but negatively correlated with openness to change value. Although the interindividual differences in value hierarchies have seldom been examined, the results are comparable to the results of previous cultural neuroscience research, which reported that compared to Westerners with individualistic self-construal, East Asians with collectivistic self-construal showed larger cortical structures in the temporal regions (Tang et al., 2018) and a higher degree of global efficiency in the temporal regions (Luo et al., 2022). The MI is considered to be a neural marker for bottom-up self-referential processing during the resting state (Frewen et al., 2020). Occipital and temporal lobe activation has been observed in social perception and social cognitive tasks, such as retrieving social knowledge (Olson et al., 2013), making context-based attributions, and inferring others’ mental states (Pehrs et al., 2017). Therefore, this result could be explained by the fact that compared to Chinese emerging adults with modernized orientation and undifferentiated orientation, those with traditional social orientation value the fundamental relatedness of the self to significant others more, and efficient processing of self-related and social-related information at the neural level may facilitate the achievement of this goal.

Conversely, compared to Chinese emerging adults with modernized orientation and undifferentiated orientation, those with traditional social orientation had weaker functional connections within the right MI. This result could be explained by the differences in “ideal affect” (the affective states that people value and would ideally like to feel) resulting from different value hierarchies. Cross-cultural studies have found that, compared to Europeans and Americans valuing high-arousal positive emotions, Chinese people with collectivist values are more likely to appreciate low-arousal positive emotions (Tsai et al., 2006), and they are likely to regulate their emotions by suppressing them (Matsumoto et al., 2008; Ford and Mauss, 2015). de Greck et al. (2012) found that the hemodynamic responses of MI negatively correlated with interdependence scores. Studies have also revealed that the expressive suppression strategies for emotion regulation in non-social contexts are associated with reduced activity in the middle insula (Vrticka et al., 2011). Chinese emerging adults with traditional social orientation prefer to adjust their own needs to fit those of their environment and maintain low-arousal emotional states. This preference may be related to the suppression of activity within the MI. Taken together, our results highlight that differences may exist in brain regions for self-relevance and other-relevance processing, subjective sensations, and emotional responses across value hierarchy types.

Some limitations of this study should be addressed in future studies. First, our sample allowed us to identify neural correlates of personal value profiles. However, a relatively high-intelligence sample of college students means that the generalization of the findings obtained from this study remains limited. Future studies with heterogeneous samples (e.g., with greater differences in age and education level) should replicate these findings. Additionally, although the influence of the relatively gender-unbalanced sample on profile creation was negligible in this study, further consideration of the gender differences or replication of our findings in a more gender-balanced sample is recommended. Second, although we centered participants’ responses around their own mean response and converted absolute ratings into relative priorities to overcome differences in response styles on rating methods, conceivably, individuals may overstate or understate their responses based on social expectations, especially in personal value surveys. Future studies should employ multiple approaches (e.g., implicit association approach and free-formatted texts analysis). Finally, the relational nature of these data and the small effect size mean that any assertions regarding causality should be made with caution. Future research using longitudinal assessments and experimental research designs (e.g., assessing neural processing differences of value hierarchy in social/non-social scenarios and perception/emotion/cognitive tasks) are therefore recommended in order to better elucidate causal patterns between value hierarchy and the neural indicators found in this study.

To summarize, three personal value profiles were identified in Chinese emerging adults, indicating the universality and specificity of individual value transformations during the modernization process. At the neural level, the differences in these personal value profiles are represented in the resting state by spontaneous activity in the right PI involved in self-related information perception, FC of the MI with TG, POC, ITG, and BG involved in self-relevance and other-relevance processing, and FC within the MI involved in emotional responses. The representation of value hierarchies by the insula in the task-free state may imply a preparatory state in which individual values guide cognition, emotion, and behavior in the future.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.

The studies involving humans were approved by The Chongqing Ninth People’s Hospital Review Board, China approved this study. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

J-QX: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, and writing – original draft. YT, JH, and M-ZY: formal analysis and writing - review & editing. Y-DS and Y-JS: investigation. KC: conceptualization, resources, funding acquisition, supervision, and writing – review & editing. GF: conceptualization, methodology, and writing – review & editing. JQ: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, and resources. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.