How Genes and Social Contexts Interact

The roots of behavior may be deeply entrenched inside every person's genetic code, but researchers say that analyzing the human mind, and its relations to the gene pool, is a lot more difficult than it looks.

Social sciences experts have some time ago began collaborating with geneticists on a series of studies meant to draw into the light the connection that exists between genes and risk behavior.

According to experts speaking at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, on August 14, this was an endeavor that was totally worth it.

Stress or other social factors may indeed play a pivotal role in our lives, as researchers propose, but they also have secondary effects as well.

For example, geneticists say, they can interact with particular gene variants to produce individuals that are more prone to developing depression, for example.

Conversely, they can also produce people capable of multitasking, and taking on levels of stress that would lead an average person to an early death.

The difficulty with this troublesome line of study is the fact that the results one team obtains are very hard to interpret by them and other, and that, usually, they defy replication attempts.

“If we don’t provide input about the importance of social context in mediating genetic effects on behavior, I can assure you that psychologists and psychiatrists won’t do it,” says Michael Shanahan.

He is an experts based at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, who is involved in such a collaboration between sociologists and geneticists.

For example, UNC colleague Guang Guo recently demonstrated that two genetic variants in young boys made the test subjects less likely to engage in violent or risky behavior.

The correlation held to the test of time, as experiment subjects continue to exhibit the same trend years after the researchers discovered the gene variants they were carrying.

The finding did not held true for individuals who were discovered to express at least one other variant of the same gene. Guo's team analyzed 822 white males, Science News reports.

“Stress occurs at many levels and in different forms. It’s very complicated to study gene-environment interplay over the course of people’s lives,” concludes Matt Bradshaw, who is also based at the UNC.