Personality, Thought To Be Stable Over Time, Changes In Healthy People Who Take A Widely Used Anti-...( athways in thebrain--pathways affected...),Health

Personality researchers measure differences in human personality by looking at a handful of components, including shyness or gregariousness, patterns of thinking, measures of negative emotionality and measures of positive emotionality. Previous research has led personality researchers to consider negative and positive emotionality to be independent variables, since a person can tend to be expressive of both negative and positive emotions, of neither type of emotion, or of one type but not the other.

This conventional thinking is buttressed by the current study, in which the researchers found that levels of hostility, and to a lesser extent anxiety and sadness, were related to blood levels of the anti-depressant, while measures of positive emotionality were apparently unaffected by the drug. This result suggests that these different aspects of personality are affected by different biochemical and neural pathways, Reus says.

The study was supported by a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral training grant and by a UCSF Research Allocation and Evaluation Grant.

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1-Mar-1998