Personality, cognitive/psychological traits and psychiatric resilience: A multivariate twin study

The purpose of this paper is to determine the phenotypic relationships, and etiologic underpinnings, of cognitive/psychological traits with psychiatric resilience. Resilience was defined as the difference between the twins' total score on a broad measure of internalizing symptoms and their predicted score based on their cumulative exposure to stressful life events (SLEs). Cholesky decompositions were performed in a large twin sample (n=7,500 individuals) to quantify the overlap in genetic and environmental factors between resilience and six traits (neuroticism, optimism, self-esteem, mastery, interpersonal dependency, altruism) in bivariate analyses, and in a multivariate model. On a phenotypic level, each trait accounted for variance in resilience in univariate analyses. In the multivariate regression neuroticism accounted for the majority of the variance and attenuated the relationships between the other traits and resilience. The genetic factors that influence the traits account for between 7-60% of the heritability of resilience. In the multivariate genetic model neuroticism accounted for all of the genetic covariance between the traits and resilience; 40% of the genetic influence on resilience was independent. Neuroticism evidenced the largest phenotypic and genetic relationship with resilience, and accounted for nearly all of the phenotypic and genetic variance between resilience and the other traits.