Molecular genetics in psychology and personality neuroscience: On candidate genes, genome wide scans, and new research strategies
Section snippets
The status quo in the investigation of the molecular genetics of personality
Personality Neuroscience represents a research discipline in the brain sciences where neuroscientific methods are used to better understand individual differences not only in the important psychological domains of motivation, emotion, cognition, but also behavior (DeYoung, 2010). An integral part of Personality Neuroscience seeks to understand the molecular genetics underpinning individual differences. This research endeavor is of importance, as twin studies have demonstrated that a substantial
Unifying the candidate gene approach and GWS to study molecular genetics of personality / or: current challenges in molecular psychology
In its quest to unravel the principles of human personality and individual differences, psychological science has been most successful when guided by theory and hypotheses. From its early day onwards, biological personality accounts have emphasized the role of the various major transmitter systems in personality traits (Eysenck, 1947; Gray, 1971; Corr and Perkins, 2006). Such hypotheses have guided valuable investigations that have made use of pharmacological manipulations through drugs or
Improving candidate gene studies
(Personality) Psychology has a long tradition in investigating human nature with guidance from clear hypothesis and theory. From this traditional point of view, the candidate gene approach clearly has its legitimacy in the scientific community. But as mentioned throughout this work, we are aware about the problems in replicating many of the genetic associations published stemming from the candidate gene approach over the years (Munafò and Flint, 2011; Montag and Reuter, 2014) – reflecting
How to choose genetic variants of interest when following a pharmacologically based candidate gene approach?
In the literature it has been quite obvious that genetic variants are most heavily investigated, when functionality has been proven. Prominent examples for polymorphisms with proven functionality are COMT Val158Met (Lachman et al., 1996), BDNF Val66Met (Egan et al., 2003), 5-HTTLPR (Lesch et al., 1996), MAO-A (Sabol et al., 1998) and more recently also OXTR rs2268498 (Reuter et al., 2017). Such information on functionality is of great importance, because it gives the researcher insights into
Further ideas to improve genetic association studies
At the ISSID conference in Warsaw a discussion was brought to the table arguing for implementing comparable self-report questionnaires in molecular genetic associations/neuroscientific studies across the globe. This would help to standardize the phenotype and presumably minimize noise across studies improving reproducibility of studies. Hence, non-replication then would have nothing to do with often strongly related, but not exactly similar assessed constructs. We understand that every
Author contribution
CM and SM planned the present work and wrote the manuscript together. Both RE and PJ revised this original version of manuscript in detail. All authors approved the final version of this manuscript.
Funding
The position of CM was funded by a Heisenberg grant awarded to him by the German Research Foundation (DFG, MO2363/3-2).
Declaration of Competing Interest
There is no conflict of interest. Outside of the scope of the present paper, Dr. Montag has received (to Ulm University and earlier University of Bonn) grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Federal Ministry for Research and Education. Dr. Montag has performed grant reviews for several agencies; has edited journal sections and articles; has given academic lectures in clinical or scientific venues or companies; and has generated books or book chapters for publishers of
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2021, CognitionCitation Excerpt :In our intuitive psychology, however, agentic natural kinds—animals and humans—are endowed not only with physical properties but also psychological ones. Since science has shown that several of these psychological traits are heritable (Bishop & Bates, 2020; Landi & Perdue, 2019; Montag, Ebstein, Jawinski, & Markett, 2020), and since laypeople's perception of heritability can be closely aligned with scientific estimates (Willoughby et al., 2019), one would expect that, all things being equal, people should uniformly essentialize all human traits, both anatomical and psychological.1 Moreover, our nativist intuitions (courtesy of essentialism) should be potentially uniform across distinct psychological traits.
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2021, Handbook of Clinical NeurologyCitation Excerpt :Finally, we are of the opinion that IUDs should be further investigated with a genome-wide-based approach, something which (i) would shed light on heritability estimates from a molecular perspective and (ii) would yield perhaps new genetic candidate markers to be investigated in the context of IUDs (for recent research strategies in the study of molecular genetics of individual differences, see Montag et al., 2020a).
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