Genes, Environment Carry Equal Weight in Mental Resilience

Both genes and environment influence psychiatric resilience to stressful life events, and both are largely stable over time, results of a large, long-term study of twins suggests.

Investigators at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond found that individual experiences and situational factors are equally important in shaping mental resilience.

“As important as our genetic findings are those regarding the environmental influences on resilience,” the investigators write. They report that roughly half of the contribution of variation in resilience was accounted for by individual-specific (ie, nonshared) environmental events that had an enduring effect.

“This suggests that individual experiences are as important as genetic constitution for determining the latent level of resilience,” the researchers, led by Ananda B. Amstadter, PhD, write.

They note that it is equally important to bear in mind that resilience is a “complex and dynamic process that unfolds over time” and that their assessment method does not fully capture this process, only the outcome. Also, the quantification of resilience is inferred in one domain (internalizing symptoms) and is based on individual variation to stressful life events experienced.