Rijsdijk F V, Riese H, Tops M, Snieder H, Brouwer W H, Smid H G O M, Ormel J
Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London, UK.
Psychol Med. 2009 Jan;39(1):45-54. doi: 10.1017/S0033291708003231. Epub 2008 Apr 1.
Prior research on the nature of the vulnerability of neuroticism to psychopathology suggests biases in information processing towards emotional rather than neutral information. It is unclear to what extent this relationship can be explained by genetic or environmental factors.
The genetic relationship between a neuroticism composite score and free recall of pleasant and unpleasant words and the reaction time on negative probes (dot-probe task) was investigated in 125 female twin pairs. Interaction effects were modelled to test whether the correlation between neuroticism and cognitive measures depended on the level of the neuroticism score.
The only significant correlation was between neuroticism and the proportion of recalled unpleasant words (heritability is 30%), and was only detectable at the higher end of the neuroticism distribution. This interaction effect seems to be due to environmental effects that make people in the same family more similar (e.g. parental discipline style), rather than genetic factors. An interesting sub-finding was that faster reaction times for left versus right visual field probes in the dot-probe task suggest that cognitive processing in the right hemisphere is more sensitive to subliminal (biologically relevant) cues and that this characteristic is under substantial genetic control (49%). Individual differences in reaction times on right visual field probes were due to environmental effects only.
There is no evidence that the predisposition of individuals to focus on negative (emotional) stimuli is a possible underlying genetic mechanism of neuroticism.
先前关于神经质易患精神病理学本质的研究表明，信息加工存在偏向情绪性而非中性信息的偏差。目前尚不清楚这种关系在多大程度上可由遗传或环境因素来解释。
在125对女性双胞胎中，研究了神经质综合得分与愉快和不愉快词汇自由回忆以及对负面探测刺激（点探测任务）反应时间之间的遗传关系。建立交互作用模型以检验神经质与认知测量之间的相关性是否取决于神经质得分水平。
唯一显著的相关性存在于神经质与回忆起的不愉快词汇比例之间（遗传度为30%），且仅在神经质分布的较高端可检测到。这种交互作用效应似乎是由于环境因素使同一家庭中的人更加相似（例如父母的管教方式），而非遗传因素。一个有趣的次要发现是，在点探测任务中，左视野与右视野探测刺激的反应时间更快，这表明右半球的认知加工对阈下（生物学相关）线索更敏感，且这一特征受大量遗传控制（49%）。右视野探测刺激反应时间的个体差异仅归因于环境因素。
没有证据表明个体倾向于关注负面（情绪性）刺激是神经质潜在的遗传机制。
