1 Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
2 Department of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Psychol Sci. 2019 Aug;30(8):1205-1217. doi: 10.1177/0956797619859340. Epub 2019 Jul 18.
Despite advances in the understanding of the reward system and the role of dopamine in recent decades, the heritability of the underlying neural mechanisms is not known. In the present study, we examined the hemodynamic activation of the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a key hub of the reward system, in 86 healthy monozygotic twins and 88 healthy dizygotic twins during a monetary-incentive-delay task. The participants also completed self-report measures of pleasure. Using voxelwise heritability mapping, we found that activation of the bilateral NAcc during the anticipation of monetary gains had significant heritability ( = .20-.49). Moreover, significant shared genetic covariance was observed between pleasure and NAcc activation during the anticipation of monetary gain. These findings suggest that both NAcc activation and self-reported pleasure may be heritable and that their phenotypic correlation may be partially explained by shared genetic variation.
尽管近几十年来对奖励系统及其多巴胺作用的理解有了进步，但仍不清楚其潜在神经机制的遗传率。在本研究中，我们在一项金钱激励延迟任务中，检查了 86 对健康的同卵双胞胎和 88 对健康的异卵双胞胎的伏隔核（NAcc）的血液动力学激活，NAcc 是奖励系统的关键枢纽。参与者还完成了关于愉悦感的自我报告测量。使用体素遗传映射，我们发现，在预期金钱收益时，双侧 NAcc 的激活具有显著的遗传率（ =.20-.49）。此外，在预期金钱收益时，愉悦感和 NAcc 激活之间存在显著的共同遗传协方差。这些发现表明，NAcc 激活和自我报告的愉悦感都可能是遗传的，并且它们的表型相关性可能部分由共同的遗传变异来解释。
