The Inheritance of Neuroticism: An Experimental Study

Abstract

It is commonly believed that heredity plays a considerable part in the determination of an individual's personality. If we accept the well-known definition of personality as “the integrated organization of all the cognitive, affective, conative and physical characteristics of an individual as it manifests itself in focal distinctness to others,” we might expect that much research endeavour would have been dedicated to the discovery of hereditary influences on the cognitive, affective, conative and physical characteristics of the individual. A certain amount of such research there has been, but its emphasis has been curiously lopsided; we have some studies into inheritance of physical characteristics, and numerous studies into the inheritance of cognitive characteristics, but there has been little worth-while research into the conative and affective sides of personality.