Background
Recently, the nature of personality disorders and their relationship with normal personality
traits has received extensive attention. The five-factor model (FFM) of personality,
consisting of the personality traits neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience,
agreeableness, and conscientiousness, is one of the proposed models to conceptualize
personality disorders as maladaptive variants of continuously distributed personality
traits.
Methods
The present study examined the phenotypic and genetic association between borderline
personality and FFM personality traits. Data were available for 4403 monozygotic twins,
4425 dizygotic twins, and 1661 siblings from 6140 Dutch, Belgian, and Australian families.
Results
Broad-sense heritability estimates for neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness,
extraversion, openness to experience, and borderline personality were 43%, 36%, 43%,
47%, 54%, and 45%, respectively. Phenotypic correlations between borderline personality
and the FFM personality traits ranged from .06 for openness to experience to .68 for
neuroticism. Multiple regression analyses showed that a combination of high neuroticism
and low agreeableness best predicted borderline personality. Multivariate genetic
analyses showed the genetic factors that influence individual differences in neuroticism,
agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion account for all genetic liability
to borderline personality. Unique environmental effects on borderline personality,
however, were not completely shared with those for the FFM traits (33% is unique to
borderline personality).
Conclusions
Borderline personality shares all genetic variation with neuroticism, agreeableness,
conscientiousness, and extraversion. The unique environmental influences specific
to borderline personality may cause individuals with a specific pattern of personality
traits to cross a threshold and develop borderline personality.
Key Words
To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
Purchase one-time access:
Academic & Personal: 24 hour online accessCorporate R&D Professionals: 24 hour online accessOne-time access price info
- For academic or personal research use, select 'Academic and Personal'
- For corporate R&D use, select 'Corporate R&D Professionals'
Subscribe:
Subscribe to Biological PsychiatryAlready a print subscriber? Claim online access
Already an online subscriber? Sign in
Register: Create an account
Institutional Access: Sign in to ScienceDirect
References
- Differentiating normal, abnormal, and disordered personality.Eur J Pers. 2005; 19: 257-268
- Assessment and diagnosis of personality disorder: Perennial issues and an emerging reconceptualization.Annu Rev Psychol. 2007; 58: 227-257
- A dimensional model of personality disorder: Proposal for DSM-V.Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2008; 31: 363-378
- Categorical and dimensional models of personality disorder.Annu Rev Clin Psychol. 2005; 1: 355-380
- Dimensional models of personality disorder: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fifth edition and beyond.Curr Opin Psychiatr. 2007; 20: 52-56
- The dimensional assessment of personality pathology (DAPP) approach to personality disorder.in: Strack S. Differentiating Normal and Abnormal Personality. 2nd ed. Springer, New York2006: 401-425
- Manual for the Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality.University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis1993
- A psychobiological model of temperament and character.Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1993; 50: 975-990
- Professional manual: Revised Neo Personality Inventory (Neo-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor-Inventory (Neo-FFI).Psychological Assessment Resources, Odessa, FL1992
- A dimensional model of personality disorder: Proposal for DSM-V.Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2008; 31: 363-378
- Five-factor model personality disorder research.in: Costa P.T. Widiger T.A. Personality Disorders and the Five Factor Model of Personality. 2nd ed. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC2002: 59-87
- The five-factor model and personality disorder empirical literature: A meta-analytic review.Clin Psychol Rev. 2004; 23: 1055-1085
- A meta-analytic review of the relationships between the five-factor model and DSM-IV-TR personality disorders: A facet level analysis.Clin Psychol Rev. 2008; 28: 1326-1342
- Heritability of personality disorder traits: A twin study.Acta Psychiatr Scand. 1996; 94: 438-444
- Genetic and environmental influences on personality: A study of twins reared together using the self- and peer report NEO-FFI scales.J Pers. 1997; 65: 449-475
- A behavioral genetic investigation of humor styles and their correlations with the big-5 personality dimensions.Pers Individ Dif. 2008; 44: 1116-1125
- Heritabilities of common and measure-specific components of the big five personality factors.J Res Pers. 1998; 32: 431-453
- Evaluating the structure of personality.in: Cloninger C.R. Personality and Psychopathology. American Psychiatric Association, Washington, DC1999: 155-197
- Comparing the biological and cultural inheritance of personality and social attitudes in the Virginia 30 000 study of twins and their relatives.Twin Res. 1999; 2: 62-80
- Further evidence against the environmental transmission of individual differences in neuroticism from a collaborative study of 45,850 twins and relatives on two continents.Behav Genet. 2000; 30: 223-233
- Non-additive and additive genetic effects on extraversion in 3314 Dutch adolescent twins and their parents.Behav Genet. 2008; 38: 223-233
- Widespread evidence for non-additive genetic variation in Cloninger's and Eysenck's personality dimensions using a twin plus sibling design.Behav Genet. 2005; 35: 707-721
- Heritability of borderline personality disorder features is similar across three countries.Psychol Med. 2008; 38: 1219-1229
- Familial resemblance of borderline personality disorder features: Genetic or cultural transmission?.PLoS ONE. 2009; 4 (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005334.): e5334
- Dimensional representations of DSM-IV cluster B personality disorders in a population-based sample of Norwegian twins: A multivariate study.Psychol Med. 2008; 38: 1617-1625
- Genetic analysis of covariance structure.Heredity. 1977; 38: 79-95
- Using LISREL to analyze genetic and environmental covariance structure.Behav Genet. 1986; 16: 237-250
- The co-morbidity of anxiety and depression in the perspective of genetic epidemiology.Psychol Med. 2005; 35: 611-624
- The structure of genetic and environmental risk factors for DSM-IV personality disorders a multivariate twin study.Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008; 65: 1438-1446
- Adding nontwin siblings to increase power.Behav Genet. 1999; 29: 366
- Netherlands twin register: From twins to twin families.Twin Res Hum Genet. 2006; 9: 849-857
- The East Flanders prospective twin survey (EFPTS).Twin Res Hum Genet. 2006; 9: 733-738
- Genetic covariation between neuroticism and the symptoms of anxiety and depression.Genet Epidemiol. 1984; 1: 89-107
- On the probability of dizygotic twins being concordant for two alleles at multiple polymorphic loci.Twin Res Hum Genet. 2006; 9: 194-197
- Personality, health and lifestyle in a questionnaire family study: A comparison between highly cooperative and less cooperative families.Twin Res Hum Genet. 2007; 10: 348-353
- The East Flanders prospective twin survey.in: Blickstein I. Keith L.G. Multiple Pregnancy: Epidemiology, Gestation and Perinatal Outcome. 2nd ed. Taylor and Francis, Oxford, England2005: 39-47
- The Personality Assessment Inventory: Professional manual.Psychological Assessment Resources, Odessa, FL1991
- Essentials of PAI Assessment.Wiley, Hoboken, NJ2003
- Borderline pathology and the personality assessment inventory (PAI): An evaluation of criterion and concurrent validity.J Pers Assess. 2007; 88: 81-89
- Borderline personality disorder features in nonclinical young adults.Psychol Assess. 1995; 7: 33-41
- Chromosome 9: Linkage for borderline personality disorder features.Psychiatr Genet. 2008; 18: 302-307
- Assessment of borderline personality disorder features in population samples: Is the personality assessment inventory-borderline scale measurement invariant across sex and age?.Psychol Assess. 2009; 21: 125-130
- Classical twin studies and beyond.Nat Rev Genet. 2002; 3: 872-882
- Mx: Statistical Modeling.7th ed. Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA2006
- Methodology for Genetic Studies of Twins and Families.Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, The Netherlands1992
- Sex differences and non-additivity in the effects of genes on personality.Twin Res. 1998; 1: 131-137
- A biosocial developmental model of borderline personality: Elaborating and extending Linehan's theory.Psychol Bull. 2009; 135: 495-510
- A longitudinal twin study of personality and major depression in women.Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1993; 50: 853-862
- Personality and major depression—A Swedish longitudinal, population-based twin study.Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2006; 63: 1113-1120
- A population-based twin study of the relationship between neuroticism and internalizing disorders.Am J Psychiatry. 2006; 163: 857-864
- Common variants in the GDF5-UQCC region are associated with variation in human height.Nat Genet. 2008; 40: 198-203
- Newly identified loci that influence lipid concentrations and risk of coronary artery disease.Nat Genet. 2008; 40: 161-169
- Diverse genome-wide association studies associate the IL12/IL23 pathway with Crohn's disease.Am J Hum Genet. 2009; 84: 399-405
- Genome-wide association study of 14,000 cases of seven common diseases and 3,000 shared controls.Nature. 2007; 447: 661-678
- A whole genome association study of neuroticism using DNA pooling.Mol Psychiatry. 2008; 13: 302-312
- Genome-wide association scan for five major dimensions of personality.Mol Psychiatry. 2009; ([published online ahead of print October 28].)
- Inhibition of axonal growth by snap-25 antisense oligonucleotides in-vitro and in-vivo.Nature. 1993; 364: 445-448
- Increased levels of SNAP-25 and synaptophysin in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in bipolar I disorder.Bipolar Disord. 2006; 8: 133-143
- Altered levels of the synaptosomal associated protein SNAP-25 in hippocampus of subjects with mood disorders and schizophrenia.Neuroreport. 2001; 12: 3257-3262
- Molecular cloning and characterization of the human CLOCK gene: Expression in the suprachiasmatic nuclei.Genomics. 1999; 57: 189-200
- Influence of CLOCK gene polymorphism on circadian mood fluctuation and illness recurrence in bipolar depression.Am J Med Genet B. 2003; 123B: 23-26
- Actimetric evidence that CLOCK 3111 T/C SNP influences sleep and activity patterns in patients affected by bipolar depression.Am J Med Genet B. 2007; 144B: 631-635
- CLOCK gene T3111C polymorphism is associated with Japanese schizophrenics: A preliminary study.Eur Neuropsychopharmacol. 2007; 17: 273-276
- Genome-wide linkage analysis of a composite index of neuroticism and mood-related scales in extreme selected sibships.Hum Mol Genet. 2004; 13: 2173-2182
- A genome-wide linkage analysis for the personality trait neuroticism in the Irish affected sib-pair study of alcohol dependence.Am J Med Genet B. 2007; 144B: 463-468
- A genome-wide scan for Eysenckian personality dimensions in adolescent twin sibships: Psychoticism, extraversion, neuroticism, and lie.J Pers. 2008; 76: 1415-1445
- Genome-wide linkage analysis of multiple measures of neuroticism of 2 large cohorts from Australia and the Netherlands.Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008; 65: 649-658
- A genome scan of neuroticism in nicotine dependent smokers.Am J Med Genet B. 2005; 132B: 65-69
- Linkage analysis of extremely discordant and concordant sibling pairs identifies quantitative-trait loci that influence variation in the human personality trait neuroticism.Am J Hum Genet. 2003; 72: 879-890
- Further comments toward a dimensional classification of personality disorder.Am Psychol. 2008; 63: 62-63
- Genome-wide association studies in psychiatry: Lessons from early studies of non-psychiatric and psychiatric phenotypes.Mol Psychiatry. 2008; 13: 649-653
Article info
Publication history
Published online: September 14, 2009
Accepted:
July 20,
2009
Received in revised form:
June 30,
2009
Received:
May 10,
2009
Identification
Copyright
© 2009 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.