Genetics and Personality Disorders
"Personality Disorders Revisited" (450 pages e-book) - click HERE to purchase!
By: Dr.
Sam Vaknin
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Are personality disorders the
outcomes of inherited traits? Are they brought on by abusive and traumatizing
upbringing? Or, maybe they are the sad results of the confluence of both?
To identify the role of heredity, researchers have resorted to a few tactics:
they studied the occurrence of similar psychopathologies in identical twins
separated at birth, in twins and siblings who grew up in the same environment,
and in relatives of patients (usually across a few generations of an extended
family).
Tellingly, twins - both those raised apart and together - show the same
correlation of personality traits, 0.5 (Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, and
Tellegan, 1990). Even attitudes, values, and interests have been shown to be
highly affected by genetic factors (Waller, Kojetin, Bouchard, Lykken, et al.,
1990).
(continued below)
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A review of the literature
demonstrates that the genetic component in certain personality disorders
(mainly Antisocial and Schizotypal) is strong (Thapar and McGuffin, 1993). Nigg
and Goldsmith found a connection in 1993 between Schizoid and Paranoid
personality disorders and schizophrenia.
The three authors of the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology
(Livesley, Jackson, and Schroeder) joined forces with Jang in 1993 to study
whether 18 of the personality dimensions were heritable. They found that 40 to
60% of the recurrence of certain personality traits across generations can be
explained by heredity: anxiousness, callousness, cognitive distortion,
compulsivity, identity problems, oppositionality, rejection, restricted
expression, social avoidance, stimulus seeking, and suspiciousness. Each and
every one of these qualities is associated with a personality disorder. In a
roundabout way, therefore, this study supports the hypothesis that personality
disorders are hereditary.
This would go a long way towards explaining why in the same family, with the
same set of parents and an identical emotional environment, some siblings grow
to have personality disorders, while others are perfectly "normal".
Surely, this indicates a genetic predisposition of some people to developing
personality disorders.
Still, this oft-touted distinction between nature and nurture may be merely a
question of semantics.
As I wrote in my book, "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited":
"When we are born, we are not much more than the sum of our genes and
their manifestations. Our brain - a physical object - is the residence of
mental health and its disorders. Mental illness cannot be explained without
resorting to the body and, especially, to the brain. And our brain cannot be
contemplated without considering our genes. Thus, any explanation of our mental
life that leaves out our hereditary makeup and our neurophysiology is lacking.
Such lacking theories are nothing but literary narratives. Psychoanalysis, for
instance, is often accused of being divorced from corporeal reality.
Our genetic baggage makes us resemble a personal computer. We are an
all-purpose, universal, machine. Subject to the right programming
(conditioning, socialization, education, upbringing) - we can turn out to be
anything and everything. A computer can imitate any other kind of discrete
machine, given the right software. It can play music, screen movies, calculate,
print, paint. Compare this to a television set - it is constructed and expected
to do one, and only one, thing. It has a single purpose and a unitary function.
We, humans, are more like computers than like television sets.
True, single genes rarely account for any behavior or trait. An array of
coordinated genes is required to explain even the minutest human phenomenon.
"Discoveries" of a "gambling gene" here and an
"aggression gene" there are derided by the more serious and less
publicity-prone scholars. Yet, it would seem that even complex behaviors such
as risk taking, reckless driving, and compulsive shopping have genetic
underpinnings."
Read More
Liveslye, W.J., Jank, K.L., Jackson, B.N., Vernon, P.A.. 1993. Genetic and
environmental contributions to dimensions of personality disorders. Am. J.
Psychiatry. 150(O12):1826-31.
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