Behavioral genetics of personality.

Behavioral genetic personality research has moved from findings of genetic and environmental effects to new areas. Personality disorders have been included, children and adolescents studied, gender effects evaluated, and the importance of rater sources investigated. Recently, multivariate methods have been applied to disentangle the genetic and environmental latent structure, and investigate covariance in mental disorders. Perhaps the most exciting recent developments are the investigations of situation variables, the studies of how genotypes influence how individuals select themselves into situations and other form of gene-environment correlations, and how genotype moderates the effect of situations and circumstances on behavior (gene-environment interaction). In the future, we will learn how personality, partly determined by heredity, influences our entire lives. We will better understand what we experience, how we interpret the experiences and how to react to them effectively. We will learn how our mental lives develop while we interact with the environment, and we will broaden our understanding of which genes are coding for mental health and mental disorders.