Academic procrastination is linked to negative urgency traits: a fMRI resting-state approach

This study explores the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying academic procrastination and Negative Urgency (NU) by analyzing brain metabolic activity and functional connectivity at resting state. Using data from 141 adults in the MPI-Leipzig Mind Brain Body dataset (OpenNeuro, RRID: SCR_005031, ds000221), we examined NU scales and resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rs-fMRI).Image preprocessing: The first 216 volumes were acquired from the original 657 to get 5 minutes of rs-fMRI recordings. Preprocessing was carried out on the CONN toolbox (Functional Connectivity SPM Toolbox 2017, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, https://web.conn-toolbox.org/) following the pipeline for volume-based analyses (Whitfield-Gabrieli & Nieto-Castanon, 2012).The preprocessing steps included 1) realignment and unwarping, functional volumes were realigned to the first volume for motion correction; 2) outlier identification using Artifact Detection Tools, computing scrubbing parameters to Tbe included as covariates in the denoising step; 3) functional direct segmentation and normalization, the mean functional volume was estimated in realignment and unwarping, and the anatomical image was normalized to MNI standard space and segmented by tissue (gray matter-GM, white matter-WM, and cerebrospinal fluid-CFS), resulting in a resampled voxel size of 2 mm for functional data and 1 mm for anatomical data; 4) functional smoothing, functional data were smoothed using a Gaussian kernel of 8 mm full width at half maximum; 5) denoising step was performed on time series to remove the effect of nuisance covariates such as WM and CFS, estimated subject-motion parameters, outlier scans (scrubbing), and session effects; 6) a temporal band-pass filter (0.008 to 0.09 Hz) was then applied to remove temporal frequencies from the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal.Results showed a positive correlation between NU and academic procrastination, linked to decreased metabolic activity in the right Temporal Pole and its connectivity with the left Temporal Pole, Posterior Cingulate Cortex, left Angular Gyrus, and right Anterior Prefrontal Cortex. These findings suggest that resting-state brain characteristics related to NU may contribute to academic procrastination by altering emotional information processing alongside self-regulatory deficits. This dataset provides valuable insights for future research on procrastination and related interventions.