TY - JOUR
T1 - Genetic psychophysiology
T2 - Advances, problems, and future directions
AU - Anokhin, Andrey P.
N1 - Funding Information:
Supported by NIH grants DA027096 and DA01889 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse . The author thanks Tara Tinnin, M.S.W. for her help with the preparation of the manuscript.
PY - 2014/8
Y1 - 2014/8
N2 - This paper presents an overview of historical advances and the current state of genetic psychophysiology, a rapidly developing interdisciplinary research linking genetics, brain, and human behavior, discusses methodological problems, and outlines future directions of research. The main goals of genetic psychophysiology are to elucidate the neural pathways and mechanisms mediating genetic influences on cognition and emotion, identify intermediate brain-based phenotypes for psychopathology, and provide a functional characterization of genes being discovered by large association studies of behavioral phenotypes. Since the initiation of this neurogenetic approach to human individual differences in the 1970s, numerous twin and family studies have provided strong evidence for heritability of diverse aspects of brain function including resting-state brain oscillations, functional connectivity, and event-related neural activity in a variety of cognitive and emotion processing tasks, as well as peripheral psychophysiological responses. These data indicate large differences in the presence and strength of genetic influences across measures and domains, permitting the selection of heritable characteristics for gene finding studies. More recently, candidate gene association studies began to implicate specific genetic variants in different aspects of neurocognition. However, great caution is needed in pursuing this line of research due to its demonstrated proneness to generate false-positive findings. Recent developments in methods for physiological signal analysis, hemodynamic imaging, and genomic technologies offer new exciting opportunities for the investigation of the interplay between genetic and environmental factors in the development of individual differences in behavior, both normal and abnormal.
AB - This paper presents an overview of historical advances and the current state of genetic psychophysiology, a rapidly developing interdisciplinary research linking genetics, brain, and human behavior, discusses methodological problems, and outlines future directions of research. The main goals of genetic psychophysiology are to elucidate the neural pathways and mechanisms mediating genetic influences on cognition and emotion, identify intermediate brain-based phenotypes for psychopathology, and provide a functional characterization of genes being discovered by large association studies of behavioral phenotypes. Since the initiation of this neurogenetic approach to human individual differences in the 1970s, numerous twin and family studies have provided strong evidence for heritability of diverse aspects of brain function including resting-state brain oscillations, functional connectivity, and event-related neural activity in a variety of cognitive and emotion processing tasks, as well as peripheral psychophysiological responses. These data indicate large differences in the presence and strength of genetic influences across measures and domains, permitting the selection of heritable characteristics for gene finding studies. More recently, candidate gene association studies began to implicate specific genetic variants in different aspects of neurocognition. However, great caution is needed in pursuing this line of research due to its demonstrated proneness to generate false-positive findings. Recent developments in methods for physiological signal analysis, hemodynamic imaging, and genomic technologies offer new exciting opportunities for the investigation of the interplay between genetic and environmental factors in the development of individual differences in behavior, both normal and abnormal.
KW - Brain
KW - EEG
KW - ERP
KW - Endophenotype
KW - Genetics
KW - Heritability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84903535499&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2014.04.003
DO - 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2014.04.003
M3 - Review article
C2 - 24739435
AN - SCOPUS:84903535499
VL - 93
SP - 173
EP - 197
JO - International Journal of Psychophysiology
JF - International Journal of Psychophysiology
SN - 0167-8760
IS - 2
ER -