Behavior Genetics: Utility for Clinical Work

BG: Utility for Clinical Work
James Brody
Revised 12/25/02. Originally presented to Maryland Psychological Assn, Columbia, MD, 11/1/02.
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1) New technology generates findings about genetics and disease: e.g., humans and Drosophila share pathogen sequences for approximately 550 human diseases. (May be due to descent or by concurrent infection?)

2) Aligns with common sense: children act and look like their parents. "Genes cause..." is plausible and acceptable (outside academia) to clients who see family similarities in their own history.

3) Our reproductive years may reflect our maximum degree of fusion with another individual. Females later return to the strategies, activities, and friends of their youth. When she is younger, she might give him a chrome horn for his Harley. When she is older, she later demands that he sell the bike because she wants an Oriental rug. She cooks for Herman" when she is young but sends him out to Wendy's while she goes out with the girls when she is older.

4) Research may find that we become less flexible in ways predicted by heritability rather than environment. That is, the contribution of G increases over time for traits other than I.Q. Implication: as we age, we become "childlike" not in a general way but resume our former interests, activities, and preferences of our adolescence and childhood!

5) Facilitates "acceptance": Neil Jacobson once said that 70% of marital interventions depend on mutual acceptance. Acceptance is also a component of parental understanding of their children and of their own parents.

6) Facilitates explorations for positive options with our clients. Go through the family tree and find the traits associated with each member. The achievements and gaffs of our relatives may warn us of those we are apt to repeat. Galton put it well:

"...the life of the individual is in some real sense a prolongation of those of his ancestry. His vigour, his character, and his diseases are principally derived from theirs; sometimes his faculties are blends of ancestral qualities; but more frequently they are mosaics, patches of resemblance to one or another of them showing now here and now there (emph. added)..." (Galton, 1911, p. 30.)

7) More on Galton's Hypothesis:

"The life-histories of our relatives are prophetic of our own futures; they are far more instructive to us than those of strangers, far more fitted to encourage and to forewarn us. If there be such a thing as a natural birthright, I can conceive of none superior to the right of the child to be informed, at first by proxy through his guardian, and afterwards personally, of the life-history, medical and other, of his ancestry."

It is plausible and many times obvious that we are mosaics of our parents and grandparents. Nature often works in combinatorial mosaics (Jacob, 1998). So far, this model is more useful for explanation, acceptance, and discovering options. Prediction may never come due to the difficulty aligning genotypes with behavior clusters, genes that switch on or off as a function of experiences, epigenesis and emergenesis.(1) (See Handout: Mosaics.)(2)

8) Hypothesis: long term outcomes may be a function of receptor characteristics rather than behavioral ones such as "personality" or "psychopathology." That is, identical twins sample options and make choices. (They also imitate each other if they live together. Each is a hub of information for the other.) Singletons go through a phase of mutual assessment on the basis of likes and dislikes.

9) Hypothesis: high individual variation in response to stress, life changes, or medication. May be somewhat predictable in regard to timing, intensity, duration, and amelioration on the basis of parental response to similar circumstances or similar medicines.

Notes & References
Pinker, S. (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking.
2) Epigenesis: several meanings of course! Usually refers to events (such as environments) that are inherited but without involving DNA. e.g. A child "inherits" his mother's uterine conditions as well as her messy household. Emergenesis also refers to the rules that direct genetic activity.
"Emergenesis" (Lykken, 1982, 1992, 1998) is another phenomenon that makes prediction difficult. Emergenesis refers to unusual combinations of genes, derived from each parent and thought to account for a mathematical or musical prodigy in the absence of such traits elsewhere in the family.
Galton, F. Inquiries into Human Faculty, 2nd Ed., 1911. Dutton. (1st Edition 1883).
Jacob, F. (1998) Of Flies, Mice, and Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lykken DT (1982) Research with twins: the Concept of emergenesis. Psychophysiology, 19(4), 361-373.
Lykken, D. (1998) The genetics of genius. In A. Steptoe (Ed.) Genius and the Mind: Studies of Creativity and Temperament. NY: Oxford, pp. 15-38.
Lykken, DT, McGue, M, Tellegen, A, & Bouchard, TJ (1992) Emergenesis: Genetic traits that may not run in families. American Psychologist, 47(12) 1565-1577.
2) Cohen, D. (1999) Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Shape Their Child's Personality, Intelligence, or Character? NY: Wiley. See pp. 99-100.
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Copyright, James Brody, 2002, all rights reserved.

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