Abstract
It is well known that human personality has an important biological basis. Many personality psychologists have committed themselves to answering the question of “how much human personality is genetic-determined”. Since the “Big Five” personality structure (Extraversion, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience) has been proved to be of universal, studied on the heredity of Big Five personality become popular, in which focus has been moved to the molecular genetic approach from the quantitative genetic approach. The quantitative genetic approach advocates estimating the heritability, the contribution rate of heredity, to the variance of big five personality in a population by means of some behavior genetic study designs such as twin study and family study.The results from twin and family studies showed that the heritability of the Big Five personality is about 31%–41% and the average heritability of Big Five personality is about 37%. The molecular genetic approach aims to identify specific genes and examine the effects of them on the personality traits at DNA level. In this area, some specific genes have been found to be associated with the Big Five personality, such as the associations of Neuroticism and CNR1 , 5-HTTLPR , SLC6A4 , BDNF , DAT1 , DRD4 ; Extraversion and ADH4 , BDNF , COMT , DRD4 , mitochondrial gene ; Agreeableness and CNR1 , ADH4 , SLC6A4 , MAOA ; Conscientiousness and ADH4 , MAOA , DRD4 , KATNAL2 ; Openess and 5-HTT , RASA1 . Some other researches also found the effects of gene-gene interactions on personality traits, such as that of the interaciton among MAOA , COMT , DRD3 on agreebleness. In addition to the gene polymorphism, DNA Copy number variation has also been found to be associated with personality trait. However, these results of molecular genetic analyzes showed that genes explain much less personality variance, even the genome-wide association study (GWAS) on the five personality factors is not that much impressed. So the specific genes associating with the big five personality are still unclear. It is therefore suggested that the personality measurements and genetic analysis methods should be improved, gene-enviornment interaction on personality traits should be studied, and epigenetic view on personality should be taken into consideration in the future.
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