The genetics of personality disorder

McGuffin, P. and Thapar, Anita ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3689-737X 1992. The genetics of personality disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry 160 (1) , pp. 12-23. 10.1192/bjp.160.1.12

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Most measurable aspects of normal personality appear to be at least moderately heritable, with direct evidence coming from family, twin and adoption studies and indirect support deriving from psychophysiological research and breeding experiments on animals. Interestingly, genetic studies also shed light on the environmental sources of variation in personality and suggest that shared family environment rarely, if ever, has any positive effect on similarity between relatives. Despite problems of classification, and variations in the use of terms, a survey of the literature provides reasonably consistent evidence of a genetic contribution to several categories of abnormal personality, which we here divide into three groups, antisocial, anxious/avoidant, and schizoid-schizotypal personalities. However, personality disorders are complex traits that do not show simple mendelian patterns of inheritance and so far molecular genetics has been of no help in understanding their aetiology. Fortunately, techniques are now becoming available that enable the detection and potential localisation of genes of small effect and which may help elucidate the molecular basis even of (probably) polygenic traits such as abnormal personality.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG) Medicine Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute (NMHRI)
Subjects:	R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Publisher:	Royal College of Psychiatrists
ISSN:	0007-1250
Last Modified:	31 Oct 2022 09:25
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/80967

Citation Data

Cited 60 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item