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A study in an extended family of monkeys provides important insights into how the risk of developing anxiety and depression is passed from parents to children.The study shows how an over-active brain circuit involving three brain areas inherited from generation to generation may set the stage for developing anxiety and depressive disorders.
[...] "Over-activity of these three brain regions are inherited brain alterations that are directly linked to the later life risk to develop anxiety and depression,'' says senior author Dr. Ned Kalin, chair of psychiatry at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. "This is a big step in understanding the neural underpinnings of inherited anxiety and begins to give us more selective targets for treatment."
[...] Interestingly, the brain circuit that was genetically correlated with individual differences in early-life anxiety involved three survival-related brain regions. These regions were located in the brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain; the amygdala, the limbic brain fear center; and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-level reasoning and is fully developed only in humans and their primate cousins.
More evidence for epigenetics. If trauma can be encoded on the genetic level and passed down to offspring, can shared trauma affect a population's DNA and in turn express itself in its group behaviors/culture?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:47AM
Agreed, unless there were some separation of of these offspring from their parents, or even re-location of the family as a unit to a less anxious environment, there seems to be little to distinguish learned anxiety from inherited.
That there may be other parent + offspring sets which exhibit less anxiety, may simply be because the parents status in the troop.
If your childhood is littered with visions of your parents getting bullied and intimidated, vs seeing them groomed by monkeys of lower standard and protected by the alphas, can make a significantly different impression on children.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.