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Hereditary-Environmental Differentiation of General Neurotic, Obsessive, and Impulsive Hysterical Personality Traits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Svenn Torgersen
Svenn Torgersen*
Affiliation:
Norwegian Research Council for Sciences and the Humanities; Center for Research in Clinical Psychology, University of Oslo
*
NAVF's Center for Research in Clinical Psychology, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1039, Blindern, Oslo 3, Norway

Abstract

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The inheritance of General Neurotic, Obsessive, and Impulsive Hysterical personality traits has been studied in a sample of 260 female and male adult same-sexed twins. At least one of the twins in each pair had been treated for neurotic or borderline disorders. The results showed that the General neurotic and the obsessive personality factor had a significantly but moderately high hereditary component. The same was also true for more than half of the 17 separate personality scales. No personality scales emerged as highly hereditary. Therefore, each item was analyzed separately, and items classified as either distinctly hereditary or environmental were placed in each of these two groups. The items of the two groups were separately factor-analyzed, and three hereditary and three environmental main factors emerged. The hereditary factors seemed to represent a basic core in the three personality factors of the total questionnaire, whereas the environmental factors could be explained as derivatives of early representation of the basic hereditary core, influenced by familial and cultural patterns.

Keywords

Personality factorsNeurosisBorderline disordersHeredityEnvironmentFamily influencesTwinsFactor Analysis
Type
Research Article
Information
Acta geneticae medicae et gemellologiae: twin research , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , July 1980 , pp. 193 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Twin Studies 1980

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