Genetic predisposition of behavioral response

As humans, we understand that our behavior and the relationships we form throughout life are manifestations of our positive and negative experiences of social interaction. However, the notion that the evolution of our behavioral response is solely shaped by the events themselves is challenged by studies that highlight how interindividual differences in social perception and response to social cues may be determined by underlying genetic predisposed. These studies are establishing that our DNA contains heritable variants that contribute to subtle differences in social cognition. These sequence variants are contained within genes that not only play a role in the relationship that parents may have with their offspring but also how we recognize or react to one another (1, 2). In PNAS, Skuse et al. (3) investigate the signaling pathways of neuropeptides oxytocin (OT) and arginine-vasopressin (AVP) to identify DNA polymorphisms that might explain interindividual differences in response to social cues. The authors genotyped a series of SNPs from the OT and AVP receptor regions to …