Genetic risk of depression and stress-induced negative affect in daily life

Abstract

Genetic liability to depression is in part expressed as the tendency to display negative affect in response to minor stressors in daily life. This trait may represent a true depression endophenotype.

Person-Specific Non-shared Environmental Influences in Intra-individual Variability: A Preliminary Case of Daily School Feelings in Monozygotic Twins

“…The key point here is to show empirically that this alternative approach provides new insights that take us beyond conventional behavioural genetic studies to ask questions about particular individuals as well as genetic and environmental contributions to intraindividual processes. The few existing studies that have collected ILD in twin samples, including the one from which we drew the data for analyses (Asbury et al 2008;Kessler et al 2004;Klump et al 2013;Wichers et al 2007), were not intended to examine genetic and environmental influences on intra-individual variability and all employed designs of a short time length, typically ranging for a few days. Another issue related to the short time series data is that many children in the current sample did not demonstrate any or much intra-individual variability to be included in the analysis, an issue the few previous studies encountered as well (e.g., Jacobs et al 2013;Menne-Lothmann et al 2012).…”

“…As opposed to conventional longitudinal designs that typically follow thousands or hundreds of participants a few times over multiple years, ILD are typically obtained intensively and repeatedly over a short time period (e.g., days, weeks) in a relatively smaller sample of participants (e.g., hundreds). Recently, behavioural genetic researchers are also starting to collect ILD in twin samples (e.g., Asbury et al 2008;Kessler et al 2004;Klump et al 2013;Wichers et al 2007). …”

“…How do results of genetic and environmental influences on intra-individual variability compare to results of genetic and environmental influences on inter-individual differences, or inter-individual differences in intra-individual changes that typically are examined in conventional behavioural genetic studies? The few existing empirical studies that have collected genetically informative ILD did not specifically examined genetic and environmental influences on intra-individual variability (e.g., Asbury et al 2008;Burt et al 2015;Cleveland and Almeida 2013;Jacobs et al 2006Jacobs et al , 2013Menne-Lothmann et al 2012;Neiss and Almeida 2004;Wichers et al 2007), and thus could not shed light on these questions.…”

“…As mentioned earlier, the few existing empirical studies that have collected genetically informative ILD on mood did not specifically examined genetic and environmental influences on intra-individual variability, but focused instead on inter-individual differences in constructs aggregated together over multiple observations, such as intra-individual mean and variation (e.g., Jacobs et al 2006Jacobs et al , 2013Menne-Lothmann et al 2012;Neiss and Almeida 2004;Wichers et al 2007). Among those studies, however, one study that followed 239 female twin pairs aged 16-25 years over a 7-day period provided some interesting results that could shed some lights on genetic and environmental influences on intra-individual variability of affect (Burt et al 2015).…”

Altered Transfer of Momentary Mental States (Atoms) as the Basic Unit of Psychosis Liability in Interaction With Environment and Emotions

“…Experience Sampling Method data (ESM, see below) were collected at baseline, as described in detail elsewhere [30,31]. These data have been used for other studies as well, but never in the context of the current research questions [30,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42], as this is the first study analysing the novel phenotype of transfer of momentary anomalous experiences in daily life. fig 1A, a momentary (note that time axis is in minutes) mental state of anomalous experience persists because the mental state is transferred from moment (t-1) to moment (t), under the influence of negative affect associated with negative environmental context.…”