The biology of personality

Anxious Personality Traits: Perspectives from Basic Emotions and Neurotransmitters

Objective: Recently, many emotional diseases, such as anxiety and depression, have prevailed, and it is expected that emotional disease will be the leading cause of social and economic burden in 2030. These emotional diseases may be due to certain personality traits, which could be the reasons for the development of mental illness. Personality theories have been constantly developed over the past hundreds of years, and different dimensions of personality traits corresponding to different physiological bases and emotional feelings have been proposed. However, personality may be the least studied area in psychology. Methods: In this paper, we will give a short review on the development of personality theories as well as dimensional emotional theory. Then, we will compare the similarities between the emotional dimension and personality dimension. Furthermore, we will also investigate the neural mechanisms of personality and emotions, focusing on neuromodulators for anxiety-related personality traits, in order to provide a clear relationship between different neurotransmitters and anxiety-related personality traits. Results: The results of our study suggest that the emotional dimension and personality dimension may be somewhat related, for example, the extrovert/introvert dimension of personality might be related to the hedonic dimension, which includes happiness/sadness, and the neurotic dimensions might be related to emotional arousal. In addition, our study found that personality traits are also related to basic emotions, for instance, people who are too self-centered are prone to feeling a mood of disgust or depression, while anger and fear correspond to unstable personality traits. The analysis suggested that the neural substrates of both personality and emotions might be described as follows: extroverted–joy–dopamine (DA); introverted–disgust–5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT); unstable (neuroticism)–anger/fear–noradrenaline (NE); stable–calmness. Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that there is a correlation between personality traits and emotions, and both depend on monoamine neurotransmitters (dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin). In addition, personality disorders can be interfered via the regulation of emotions and neurotransmitters. This paper opens up a whole new perspective for future research on personality traits and emotional diseases and has great clinical value and practical significance.

Treatment of personality disorder

The evidence base for the effective treatment of personality disorders is insufficient. Most of the existing evidence on personality disorder is for the treatment of borderline personality disorder, but even this is limited by the small sample sizes and short follow-up in clinical trials, the wide range of core outcome measures used by studies, and poor control of coexisting psychopathology. Psychological or psychosocial intervention is recommended as the primary treatment for borderline personality disorder and pharmacotherapy is only advised as an adjunctive treatment. The amount of research about the underlying, abnormal, psychological or biological processes leading to the manifestation of a disordered personality is increasing, which could lead to more effective interventions. The synergistic or antagonistic interaction of psychotherapies and drugs for treating personality disorder should be studied in conjunction with their mechanisms of change throughout the development of each.

The development, evolution and philosophy of a clinical research unit

OBJECTIVE

To describe the development,evolution and philosophy of a clinical research unit.

METHOD

The 20-year history of clinical psychiatric research in Christchurch is described. The variety of influences which have impacted upon the studies undertaken is acknowledged,as are the personal histories of key staff.

CONCLUSIONS

Clinical research is potentially endangered. The maintenance and development of clinical research requires a mix of individual inquisitiveness and determination,local opportunity and political will. Despite a political desire for evidence-based medicine; most political policies and practices impede the development of new knowledge and the collection of new evidence.

[Personality dimensions and cerebral evoked potential]

Eysenck's personality theory postulates 3 orthogonal dimensions of personality: extraversion (E), neuroticism (N) and psychoticism (P), predicting conductual and physiological predispositions to suffer mental illness. Biological bases of Eysenck's personality traits have been documented electrophysiologically. Psychoticism, the latest described dimension, is controverted, since there is some evidence of common factors with the other two. In order to assess the relation between Eysenck's dimensions and sensorial reactivity and information encoding processes we studied 20 healthy young subjects (mean age 28.5 years) with flash visual cortical evoked potentials (VEP, 3 intensities, peak to peak amplitude of III, IV-V-VI, VII components), and auditory cognitive evoked potentials (odd ball paradigm, P300 latency). There was a positive correlation between N and P dimensions (Spearman, r = 0.52), between N and VEP amplitude at high intensity (r = 0.58) and a negative correlation between E and P300 latency (r = 0.58). In short we found that P is not an independent dimension, but is related to sensorial reactivity. E dimension was related to encoding processes supporting Eysenck's observations about memory and learning differences.

Temperament and early environment influence comorbidity and personality disorders in major depression

Measures of temperament and early environment were obtained from 108 patients with major depression using the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) and Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI). TPQ and PBI measures distinguished between depressed patients and controls. Depressed patients with comorbid axis I disorders appear to be temperamentally different from those who do not have these disorders. Those with alcoholism have higher novelty seeking (NS) scores; those with panic disorder have higher harm avoidance (HA) scores; and those with simple phobia have higher persistence (P) scores. More than half the patients had an axis II disorder. Those with a comorbid personality disorder recall worse parental care and have lower reward dependence (RD) scores. Individual personality disorders and DSM-III-R personality disorder clusters reflect to a significant degree underlying temperament as measured by the TPQ. These results suggest that it is possible to better understand the patterns of comorbidity between major depression, other axis I disorders, and personality disorders by studying the underlying temperament dimensions in these patients.