Genes Control How Sensitive and Emotional You Are, Reveals Study

A team of researchers has claimed that the level of sensitivity of people is determined by their genes. In addition, the study has revealed that behaviours such as grabbing other's attention or crying during an emotional movie are hereditary.

Rebecca Todd, a professor from the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, had found in a previous study that people who carry a certain genetic variant — ADRA2B — when present in the brain, can vividly perceive positive and negative images. The images, thus formed can then affect the activity in specific regions of the brain.

In the recent research, the research team, led by Todd, focussed on how these images affect the brain. During the research, the brain scans of 39 participants were studied, of which 21 subjects carried the ADRA2B gene. The researchers then estimated the amount of noise applied to the images that had negative, positive or neutral emotional impact on the subjects.

The team found that the people who carried the gene, estimated lower level of noise on negative or positive images, which, according to the researchers, is an indicator of emotional vividness. The same participants with the ADRA2B gene showed remarkable higher activity in the amygdala region of the brain. This region is responsible for emotional control in humans and also controls the feeling of threat or pleasure.

People who have the deletion variant are drawing on an additional network in their brains important for calculating the emotional relevance of things in the world. In any situation where noticing what's relevant in the environment is important, this gene variation would be a positive," pointed out Todd in a press release.

Todd further added on to explain the variant with the help of an example of Marcel Proust, a French novelist. "He bit into the Madeleine cookie and then wrote seven volumes of memoirs. He probably was emotionally sensitive too, and he was certainly creative. He's a classic deletion carrier.”

The study has been published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

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