PERSONALITY AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY - GENETIC PERSPECTIVES

Genetic factors exert an important influence on adult personality trai ts, accounting for anywhere between 30% and 60% of the variance. Hered ity is also important for most forms of psychopathology and plays a ma jor role in several theories that relate personality to psychopatholog y. Despite this, there has been surprisingly little multivariate genet ic research reported on joint analyses of personality and psychopathol ogy. The small amount of available data suggests that genes may accoun t for over 50% of the observed correlation between neuroticism and sta te symptoms of anxiety and depression. The mechanisms behind such stro ng genetic correlations are crucial for understanding the causal relat ionship between a personality trait and a disorder because genetically influenced biological systems may operate as exogenous ''third-party' ' factors that are responsible for what appear to be phenotypic cause- effect relationships. We illustrate how recent analytical advances in behavior genetics can use multivariate family data to address question s about the causal role of personality in psychopathology.