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Updated: Jul 19, 2026

Observational Fear as a Model of Affective Empathy in Mice
Published on: November 22, 2024
Identifying the genetic determinants of emotionality in humans; insights from rodents
Saffron A G Willis-Owen1, Jonathan Flint
1Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Roosevelt Drive, Headington, Oxford, OX3 7BN, UK. s.willis-owen@imperial.ac.uk
Abstract:
The identification of human quantitative trait genes underlying variation in emotionality has proved to be both difficult and expensive. Whilst several QTL have been consistently identified and independently replicated across both phenotypes and populations, little progression has been made towards the identification of underlying genes or even variants. In this review we discuss the potential for using cross-species QTL concordance as a tool for QTL dissection in behaviour genetics, using an affect-related locus mapped to human chromosome 1 as an example.
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