许多人格心理学家都在致力于回答＂人格有多少是遗传的＂这一问题.双生子与家系研究的结果发现,大五人格的遗传度大约在31%~41%.然而,分子遗传分析的结果却显示,基因对人格的解释大多都是微效的,因此识别与人格相关的特定基因的路程还很长.未来的研究可以考虑进一步改进人格的测量手段以及人格遗传的分析手段,考虑遗传与环境的交互作用对人格的影响,以及从表观遗传学的角度来考虑个体人格的形成.

It is well known that human personality has an important biological basis. Many personality psychologists have committed themselves to answering the question of ＂how much human personality is genetic-determined＂. Since the ＂Big Five＂ personality structure（Extraversion, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience） has been proved to be of universal, studied on the heredity of Big Five personality become popular, in which focus has been moved to the molecular genetic approach from the quantitative genetic approach. The quantitative genetic approach advocates estimating the heritability, the contribution rate of heredity, to the variance of big five personality in a population by means of some behavior genetic study designs such as twin study and family study. The results from twin and family studies showed that the heritability of the Big Five personality is about 31%–41% and the average heritability of Big Five personality is about 37%. The molecular genetic approach aims to identify specific genes and examine the effects of them on the personality traits at DNA level. In this area, some specific genes have been found to be associated with the Big Five personality, such as the associations of Neuroticism and CNR1, 5-HTTLPR, SLC6A4, BDNF, DAT1, DRD4; Extraversion and ADH4, BDNF, COMT, DRD4, mitochondrial gene; Agreeableness and CNR1, ADH4, SLC6A4, MAOA; Conscientiousness and ADH4, MAOA, DRD4, KATNAL2; Openess and 5-HTT, RASA1. Some other researches also found the effects of gene-gene interactions on personality traits, such as that of the interaciton among MAOA, COMT, DRD3 on agreebleness. In addition to the gene polymorphism, DNA Copy number variation has also been found to be associated with personality trait. However, these results of molecular genetic analyzes showed that genes explain much less personality variance, even the genome-wide association study（GWAS） on the five personality factors is not that much impressed. So the specific genes associating with the big five personality are still unclear. It is therefore suggested that the personality measurements and genetic analysis methods should be improved, gene-enviornment interaction on personality traits should be studied, and epigenetic view on personality should be taken into consideration in the future.