Project 4: Trait Fear and Fearlessness in Humans (pg 229)

越来越多的人对将人格和精神病理学的维度映射到 生物系统。恐惧是这方面的一个关键概念，因为它代表了 具有直接生物学意义和明确心理健康影响的人类变异。《博大》 这项研究的目的是探索儿童特质恐惧和无畏的病因。 并研究与个体恐惧差异有关的大脑机制 反应性。这项工作的基础是先前的研究，表明恐惧增强会造成损害。 在被监禁的精神病患者中感到震惊，他们被概念化为无所畏惧。 最近的研究表明，在社区参与者中，无所畏惧的人也有类似的损伤 优势，一种与心理变态相关的概念，充当特质恐惧的低极指示器。三 为扩展这项工作，建议分阶段进行研究，考虑到以下目标：(1) 特质恐惧和无畏的心理测量将从一个大型双胞胎社区收集 样本，以评估遗传和环境对潜在恐惧维度的贡献；(2) 这对双胞胎将在实验室进行测试，以确定恐惧加剧的惊吓作为这一点的标志 潜在特质恐惧维度，并确定这种关联的病因学基础；以及(3)双胞胎 被选为恐惧分数和恐惧程度这两个特征的低或高的配对将增强惊吓 在一项神经成像(FMRI)研究中进行了测试，以调查与 并提供导致这些差异的原因的线索。这项研究将 有助于我们理解性格中恐惧和无畏的生物学基础 人类，并与此相关，推进概念和测量的一个结构 与人格和精神病理学的基本关联。

There is increasing interest in mapping dimensions of personality and psychopathology onto biological systems. Fear is a key construct in this regard because it represents a dimension of human variation with direct biological significance and clear mental health implications. The broad objective of the proposed research is to explore etiologic contributions to trait fear and fearlessness in human participants and to examine brain mechanisms associated with individual differences in fear reactivity. A foundation for this work is prior research demonstrating impairments in fear-potentiated startle among incarcerated psychopathic individuals, who have been conceptualized as fearless. More recent research has revealed similar impairments in community participants high in Fearless Dominance, a psychopathy-related construct that acts as a low pole indicator of trait fear. Three phases of research are proposed to extend this work, with the following aims in mind: (1) Psychometric measures of trait fear and fearlessness will be collected from a large community twin sample to evaluate genetic and environmental contributions to a latent fear dimension; (2) A subset of these twin pairs will be tested in the laboratory to establish fear-potentiated startle as a marker of this underlying trait fear dimension, and to determine the etiologic basis of this association; and (3) Twin pairs selected to be low or high on both trait-fear scores and level of fear-potentiated startle will be tested in a neuro-imaging (fMRI) study to investigate differences in brain reactivity associated with variations in trait fear, and to yield clues as to the etiology of these differences. This research will contribute to our understanding of the biological underpinnings of trait fear and fearlessness in humans, and in connection with this, advance conceptualization and measurement of a construct of fundamental relevance to personality and psychopathology.