Cavigelli Sonia A, Ragan Christina M, Michael Kerry C, Kovacsics Colleen E, Bruscke Alexander P
Biobehavioral Health Department and Integrative Biological Sciences Program, The Pennsylvania State University, USA.
Physiol Behav. 2009 Aug 4;98(1-2):205-14. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2009.05.012. Epub 2009 May 27.
Several personality/temperament traits have been linked to health outcomes in humans and animals but underlying physiological mechanisms for these differential outcomes are minimally understood. In this paper, we compared the strength of a behavioral trait (behavioral inhibition) and an associated physiological trait (glucocorticoid production) in predicting life span. In addition, we examined the relative stability of both the behavioral and physiological traits within individuals over a significant portion of adulthood, and tested the hypothesis that a stable behavioral trait is linked with a stable physiological bias. In a sample of 60 Sprague-Dawley male rats, we found that stable inhibition/neophobia was a stronger predictor of life span than stably elevated glucocorticoid production. In addition, these predictors appeared to have an additive influence on life span in that males with both risk factors (stable inhibition and consistently high glucocorticoid production) had the shortest life spans of all, suggesting both traits are important predictors of life span. Across a 4-month period in young adulthood, inhibition and glucocorticoid reactivity were relatively stable traits, however these two traits were not highly correlated with one another. Interestingly, baseline glucocorticoid production was a better predictor of life span than reactivity levels. The results indicate that glucocorticoid production in young adulthood is an important predictor of life span, although not as strong a predictor as inhibition, and that other physiological processes may further explain the shortened life span in behaviorally-inhibited individuals.
一些性格/气质特征已被证明与人类和动物的健康结果有关，但对于这些不同结果背后的生理机制，人们了解得还很少。在本文中，我们比较了一种行为特征（行为抑制）和一种相关生理特征（糖皮质激素分泌）在预测寿命方面的强度。此外，我们研究了成年期大部分时间内个体行为和生理特征的相对稳定性，并检验了稳定的行为特征与稳定的生理倾向相关这一假设。在60只斯普拉格-道利雄性大鼠的样本中，我们发现稳定的抑制/新事物恐惧比稳定升高的糖皮质激素分泌更能预测寿命。此外，这些预测因素似乎对寿命有累加影响，因为同时具有两种风险因素（稳定的抑制和持续高糖皮质激素分泌）的雄性大鼠寿命最短，这表明这两种特征都是寿命的重要预测因素。在成年早期的4个月时间里，抑制和糖皮质激素反应性是相对稳定的特征，但这两种特征彼此之间相关性不高。有趣的是，基线糖皮质激素分泌比反应水平更能预测寿命。结果表明，成年早期的糖皮质激素分泌是寿命的重要预测因素，尽管不如抑制作用那么强，而且其他生理过程可能进一步解释行为抑制个体寿命缩短的原因。
