Neurogenetic Studies of Variability in Human Emotion

Abstract

As research in cognitive neuroscience has progressed in the last decades, there have been many important technological and methodological advances in the increasingly complimentary fields of molecular genetics and neuroimaging. These advances have facilitated fruitful collaboration across once disparate disciplines, with early results shedding new light on the mechanisms that give rise to individual differences in complex behaviors and related psychiatric disorders. At the leading edge of such efforts is imaging genetics, an experimental strategy for the effective integration of molecular genetics and neuroimaging technologies for the study of biological mechanisms that mediate individual differences in behavior and related risk for psychiatric disorders. Imaging genetics studies have provided a more complex and nuanced understanding of the pathways and mechanisms through which the dynamic interplay of genes, brain, and environment shapes variability in behavior. This chapter provides a brief overview of these studies and discusses the broader potential of imaging genetics, through its orchestrated application with studies of environmental effects and its continued integration with basic animal research, to inform risk and resiliency.