The emergence of genomic psychology

Abstract

To say that psychology was born out of biology is not a huge overstatement. Many of the founders of modern psychology were trained in medicine, physiology or the natural sciences, and regarded psychology as the physiology of behaviour. Wilhelm Wundt, who founded modern experimental and cognitive psychology, and published the Principles of Physiological Psychology in 1874, studied medicine and worked as an assistant to the physicist Herrmann von Helmholtz. William James, who is widely regarded as a founder of psychology in the USA, earned a medical degree and, in 1890, published the influential Principles of Psychology , which starts with a chapter on brain function. Ivan Pavlov, whose work in the 1890s on the conditioning of reflexes in dogs gave rise to behaviourism, received his doctorate in the natural sciences. ![][1] Given its roots in the biological sciences, it is not surprising that psychology has absorbed many technical innovations from biological research, although their incorporation has been confined largely to the subfield of biological psychology. This has changed notably over the past 15 years, as investigators have begun to use non‐invasive functional neuroimaging technologies to study human behaviour and psychological processes. Today, this type of analysis cuts across all domains of psychology—clinical, cognitive, developmental and social/health—and represents the lowest level of the reductionist ladder, as it descends from behaviour to neurons. Here, I suggest that the field of psychology is about to undergo another transformation that will affect all of its subfields, and that will push analyses further down to the level of the genome. This transformation is inspired by genomics—defined as the molecular study of the entire genome, as opposed to the genetics of single genes—and by the interactions among genes, and those between genes and the environment. Genomics is more powerful than quantitative genetics—which has produced studies based on … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif