PSYCHOGENETICS • Great Russian Encyclopedia

Article for the “bio/mol/text” competition: What is responsible for learning abilities—upbringing or heredity? Experts from different scientific fields usually defend their own point of view: either external factors (social relations) or internal ones (psychophysiological processes) are called decisive. Psychogenetics, as a science focused on the study of heredity and variability of psychophysiological properties, is inclined to the statement: a person is formed under the influence of both factors. This can be stated, in particular, by the results of works using the GWAS (genome-wide association search) technique - a direction of biological research associated with the comparative analysis of genomic variants and phenotypic traits. One such study, led by the international consortium SSGAC, recently found that genes do not influence human learning as much as it seems.

Methods of psychogenetics

This is the name for methods that allow us to determine the influence of hereditary factors and the environment on the formation of certain mental characteristics of a person. The main methods of psychogenetics are: population, genealogical, method of adopted children and method of twins.

The twin method
is one of the most informative.

It is based on the fact that monozygotic (identical) twins have an identical genotype, while dizygotic (fraternal) twins have a non-identical genotype. At the same time, members of twin pairs of any type should have a similar upbringing environment, then the greater intra-pair similarity of monozygotic twins compared to dizygotic twins may indicate the presence of hereditary influences on the variability of the trait being studied. A significant limitation of this method is that the similarity of the actual psychological characteristics of monozygotic twins may also have a non-genetic origin.

The genealogical method
is the study of similarities between relatives in different generations.

This requires accurate knowledge of a number of characteristics of direct relatives on the maternal and paternal lines and coverage of the widest possible range of blood relatives. It is also possible to use data from a sufficient number of different families to reveal similarities in pedigrees. This method is mainly used in medical genetics and anthropology. However, the similarity of generations in terms of psychological characteristics can be explained not only by their genetic transmission, but also by social continuity.

The population method
allows us to study the distribution of individual genes or chromosomal abnormalities in human populations.

To analyze the genetic structure of a population, it is necessary to examine a large group of individuals, which must be representative, that is, representative, allowing one to judge the population as a whole. This method is also more informative when studying various forms of hereditary pathology.

Analysis of the heritability of normal psychological traits -
this method, taken in isolation from other methods of psychogenetics, does not provide reliable information, because differences between populations in the distribution of a particular psychological trait can be caused by social reasons, customs, etc.
The adopted children method
is a comparison of similarities on some psychological basis between a child and his biological parents, on the one hand, and the child and the adoptive parents who raised him, on the other.

The methods require mandatory statistical processing specific to each method. The most informative methods of mathematical analysis require the simultaneous use of at least the first two methods.

Dictionary

Alleles are alternative forms of a gene located in the same regions of homologous chromosomes. If an organism is diploid, then normally it can contain either two identical or two different alleles of the same gene. In the first case, the organism will be homozygous, in the second - heterozygous. Different alleles determine alternative development options for the same trait. Genetic correlation (ρ) is the degree of similarity in the variability of two or more traits under the influence of common genetic influences. A genotype is a set of genes in an organism that characterizes not a species, but an individual. Genotyping is the determination of all alleles of all loci of a given chromosome. Candidate genes are genes that may be associated with the expression of complex traits or diseases. Locus is the location of a specific gene on a chromosome. Macular degeneration is a complex of diseases manifested by degradation of the central part of the retina (macula, macula). Neuroticism is a personality trait characterized by emotional instability, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Polygenic phenotype is a phenotype that is determined not by one gene, but by many. Linked inheritance is the joint inheritance of several alleles located on the same chromosome (they are simply not separated during crossing over between homologous chromosomes). Phenotype is the individual “non-genomic” characteristics of a person acquired during his development (including diseases and behavioral characteristics). Gene expression is the implementation of information encoded in a gene, including the synthesis of RNA from a DNA template and (not always) the further construction of a protein from an RNA template. P-value is a value used in testing statistical hypotheses, the probability of error if the null hypothesis is rejected. If we talk about GWAS, the lower this indicator, the more reliable the association of the SNP with the phenotypic trait; the P value should ideally be very low, approximately 10−7–10−8.

Notes

Trubnikov V.I.
Psychogenetics. Unit 1. - M.: Modern Humanitarian University, 2000. - 71 p.
↑ 123
Psychogenetics: Textbook. Alexandrov A. A. - St. Petersburg, 2007. - 192 p.: ill. — (Tutorial Series) ISBN 5-94723-662-1
Ravich-Scherbo I. V., Maryutina T. M., Grigorenko E. L. Ed.
I. V. Ravich-Scherbo Psychogenics. Textbook. - M.: Aspect Press, 2000. - 447 p. — ISBN 5-7567-0232-6 https://www.pedlib.ru/Books/1/0187/1_0187-1.shtml
Psychogenetics (inaccessible link) // Kondakov I. Psychological Dictionary, 2000.

GWAS as an interdisciplinary technique

GWAS processes the complete DNA sequences of each study participant. GWAS are often conducted as a search for links between a particular disease and single differences in gene alleles.

These one-nucleotide differences, which have proven to be very effective markers when comparing genomes, are called single nucleotide polymorphisms , or SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism). SNPs themselves are the result of point mutations. A genome-wide search for connections establishes a correlation between a specific genome variant, characterized by a unique set of SNPs, and the presence of a disease. This circumstance makes GWAS especially valuable for modern biomedicine: analysis of genetic predisposition to diseases, as well as corresponding prediction, helps to personalize treatment and prevention [3].

GWAS is based on an analysis of the frequency of occurrence of alleles of various genes: if, when comparing DNA within a sample, some gene alleles occur in people with the phenotype under study significantly more often than others, they can be conditionally considered “responsible” for the manifestation of this phenotype. Thus, the main criteria for the applicability of GWAS are the presence of a representative sample (usually with a large number of participants) and, of course, the very ability to identify the relationship (association) between genotype and phenotype .

The first ever effective GWAS was carried out by employees of the Laboratory of Statistical Genetics at Rockefeller University in 2005 on a sample of two groups, one of which consisted of patients with macular degeneration , and the second, a control group, of healthy people. A comparison of their DNA samples revealed two SNPs.

For all individuals, genotyping of already known SNPs is first carried out, after which for each SNP they check how different the occurrence of alleles is in the test and control groups. Already in the early 2010s, the number of SNPs associated with diseases exceeded 4,000: by that time, DNA analysis had been carried out on hundreds of thousands of people. In addition, the development of all genetic disciplines has stimulated the emergence of biobanks - large repositories of human genetic material.

P-values of associations and other thematic information are publicly available In general, to visualize data in GWAS, so-called Manhattan plots are used (Fig. 1), where the degree of association is displayed as a negative logarithm of the P-value depending on the locus , that is, the genomic coordinates of the snip.

Figure 1. EY Manhattan plot, where each dot represents a SNP. The X axis is the location of the SNP in the genome, the Y axis is the level of association of each SNP (the stronger the association with a trait, the lower its P-value, which means the higher the negative logarithm of this value and the corresponding “column”). The graph shows SNPs from the 2013 GWAS and 74 newly discovered loci (marked with red crosses) associated with learning.

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It should be noted that the results of using GWAS are themselves very diverse. For example, in 2020 alone, an international team of scientists from the USA, Germany and Great Britain identified a connection between immune disorders and serious mental disorders [4]. Another research group analyzed genes believed to be responsible for various features of human faces [5]. And members of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (abbreviated SSGAC), which brought together specialists in genetics, medicine and sociology, used a genome-wide search to study the role of genes in human learning [6]. Let us dwell on the latter in more detail, because it serves as an illustrative example of the use of GWAS to solve problems of psychogenetics.

Literature

Goldhaber D. The nature-nurture debates: bridging the gap. Cambridge University Press, 2013. - 188 p.;
Jensen A. R. (1969). How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement. Harvard Educational Review. 39, 1–123;
From medicine for everyone - to medicine for everyone!;
Tylee DS, Hess JL, Tahir MA, Sharma E, Malik R, Worrall BB et al. (2016). Genetic correlations among brain-behavioral and immune-related phenotypes based on genome-wide association data. bioRxiv;
Shaffer JR, Orlova E, Lee MK, Leslie EJ, Raffensperger ZD, Heike CL et al. (2016). Genome-wide association study reveals multiple loci influencing normal human facial morphology. PLoS Genet. 12 , e1006149;
Okbay A, Beauchamp JP, Fontana MA, Lee JJ, Pers TH, Rietveld CA et al. (2016). Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment. Nature. 533, 539–542;
Rietveld CA, Medland SE, Derringer J, Yang J, Esko T, Martin NW et al. (2013). GWAS of 126,559 individuals identifies genetic variants associated with educational attainment. Science. 340, 1467–1471;
Krapohl E., Rimfeld K., Shakeshaft NG, Trzaskowski M., McMillan A., Pingault JB et al. (2014). The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 111, 15273–15278;
Pearson T.A. and Manolio T.A. (2008). How to interpret a genome-wide association study. JAMA. 299, 1335–1344;
Okbay A., Baselmans BM, De Neve JE, Turley P., Nivard MG, Fontana MA et al. (2016). Genetic variants associated with subjective well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism identified through genome-wide analyses. Nat. Genet. 48, 624–633.

Genome-wide search for SSGAC and “education genes”

We are talking about a large-scale GWAS, which involved DNA samples from several hundred thousand individuals and several hundred scientists from England, Sweden, Holland and many other countries.

This study grew out of an earlier SSGAC project [7], the results of which were published by Science in 2013. It was then that an international group of researchers from 129 research centers located in 13 European countries, Australia and the United States first discovered genetic markers that determine academic performance. The researchers then estimated the total contribution of the analyzed genetic factors to learning at 2%.

Accordingly, the archival materials from the study of 101,069 individuals were “inherited” by a new population sample, in the formation of which the main criteria were the European origin of individuals and age of at least 30 years. The resulting sample size ( n ) was 293,723. The new study also included data from 111,349 individuals from the UKB (United Kingdom Biobank). Subsequently, the genetic correlation ( ρ ) between the sample and the biobank data was 0.95. This is a very high indicator, since the maximum value of the correlation coefficient is one.

Education in all analyzes was counted as the number of years a person has formally spent on education—abbreviated as EY (EduYears), with a mean of 14.3 and a low of 3.6. Although this level is highly dependent, for example, on social factors, previous studies have also shown that genetic factors are potentially responsible for at least 20% of the variability in EY among individuals [7]. In addition, according to the results of the same work, natural selection contributes to a decrease in study time by about one and a half months per generation.

SNPs associated with education turned out to be unevenly located in regions of the genome that regulate gene expression in the brain. In the case of educational attainment, candidate genes are expressed predominantly in the nervous tissue of the brain, especially during fetal development.

The information obtained from measuring educational attainment about an entire population also turned out to be useful for testing the genetic influence on a number of other traits, for example, cognitive activity and neuropsychiatric diseases. Based on the summary statistics (Fig. 2), scientists have established a genetic correlation between increased education and improved cognitive function, increased intracranial volume, increased risk of bipolar disorder, and at the same time decreased risk of Alzheimer's disease and decreased neuroticism . They also found positive and statistically significant, but still very small, genetic correlations with the risk of schizophrenia and human height.

Figure 2. Genetic correlation of EY (education) with other traits.

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The authors themselves emphasize that the established genetic associations explain only a small proportion of the variability in learning, depending mainly on environmental conditions [8]. The problem is that you can always say: the sample used in this particular GWAS is not representative. It is not so easy to refute this statement [9].

In addition, SSGAC members made a different conclusion based on the same GWAS: subjective well-being, neuroticism and depression have a high genetic correlation: ρ ≈ 0.8 (the corresponding material was recently published in Nature Genetics [10]). In itself, this study of loci associated with three phenotypes (“subjective well-being”, where n = 298,420; “depressive symptoms”, where n = 161,460; “neuroticism”, where n = 170,911), according to the authors, shows that with the help of GWAS it is possible to successfully establish associations of SNPs even with extremely polygenic phenotypes , if the sample is large enough, and such a high correlation coefficient obtained from a joint study of three associations increases confidence in the corresponding conclusions.

Regardless, GWAS are consistently uncovering new candidate genes and pathways that can be used in further research. This is true both in the case of the analysis of “learning genes” and in the case of other modern projects of this kind.

Psychogenetics as a field of modern science

Let's start with a standard definition: psychogenetics is a science that arose at the intersection of genetics and psychology and studies the role of heredity and environment in the formation of human psychophysiological properties, the relationship between genotype (features that are transmitted to a person genetically) and phenotype (acquired in the process life personal characteristics). There is an option: psychogenetics is a science also called genophysics and owes its development not only to genetics and psychology, but also to physics! What is unique is that in some countries of the world it is believed that psychogenetics can provide simple and accessible life advice on how to feel happy, prosperous and healthy.

Abroad they prefer to talk about the genetics of human behavior (behavioral genetics). The purpose of the study is to try to find out how genetic and environmental factors are involved in the formation of the phenotype. One thing is almost clear: the term “behavior genetics” is not entirely adequate, since the unit of behavior analysis is still, we see, an act, and it cannot be considered a sign in the genetic sense of the word, and, in turn, mental properties studied by psychogenetics (intelligence quotient, temperament, etc.) are not behavior. Of course, you can judge a person’s behavior from the outside by analyzing it - hence the understanding and assessment of memory, intelligence, temperament, will... Peculiarities of human behavior or mental properties represent special signs of the phenotype. But it is precisely the psychogenetic analysis of behavior that is extremely complex also because for a person the participation of the environment in the formation of the phenotype is not simply in the influence “here and now” - the environment is not only the physical environment, but is manifested in complex and diverse cultural and social influences, each of which has its own history.

When defining the range of problems of psychogenetics as a science, it is worth mentioning the relatively recently appeared term behavioral genomics - a term introduced to designate the psychological level of analysis of the work of genes (2000). It arose by analogy with functional genomics, which studies the features of gene functioning at the molecular level, including the interaction of the products of gene activity - proteins. There is also a term for the concept of protein genomics – “proteomics”. Proteomics solves a complex problem, since it is already quite clear that even after the processes of transcription and translation, the information encoded in genes undergoes serious modifications. True, let us say that new, increasingly effective research methods are also emerging: techniques have been developed that make it possible to “turn off” certain genes or, conversely, include them in the genome and study the consequences of these manipulations; Today it is possible to evaluate the expression of a large number of genes in certain areas of the brain after certain events. So, functional genomics tries to establish how a gene works, what its activity leads to and how it is realized in the phenotype, and behavioral genomics is a direction of research that comes from the level of behavior. To understand how genes work, it is necessary to establish how genetic effects interact and correlate with environmental influences, individual experience, what contribution gene influences have on the course of development, how they influence behavior and various types of psychopathology - and these are the main questions of behavioral genomics (besides estimates of heritability of certain psychological properties).

Psychologists once believed that the characteristics of human behavior are almost entirely determined by the influences of the environment in which development occurs. Psychogenetics drew attention to the nature of individual differences in humans (modern differential psychology today is unthinkable without a psychogenetic approach) - absolutely identical influences can lead not to an increase in similarity, but to the emergence of a significant number of differences between people, different genotypes under the influence of the same environmental influences can form different phenotypes .

Psychogenetics has significantly influenced developmental and developmental psychology, forcing us to reconsider such traditional positions as the increasing role of environmental influences on the formation of personality traits as we grow older. And the importance of environmental influences on the formation of properties common to members of the same family has been questioned - as a result of the study of psychogenetic data, it becomes known that the same environmental influences are experienced differently by family members and can lead to differences in many mental traits. And in general, it is likely that a simple separation of genetic and environmental influences is practically impossible in some cases: the genotype can actively interact with the environment (to the point that environmental influences themselves, to some extent, become predetermined by the characteristics of the genotype). Detection of genotype-environment interactions and determination of their role in the formation of behavior is one of the most important tasks of psychogenetics.

So, for all psychology, the importance of psychogenetics is determined by the fact that it makes it possible to clarify the role of environmental influences in the development of certain personality characteristics and helps to identify those components of the environment that can really influence the formation of the characteristics of a person’s behavior and the properties of his psyche. When planning psychological experiments, it is worth considering ways to separate the effects of the environment on the individual from the influences of the individual on the environment (it must be taken into account that there is a large amount of data showing very strong individual differences in reactions to environmental influences. And often environmental influences, which are, for example, a risk factor the occurrence of any pathology are most clearly manifested in those individuals who have a genetically determined predisposition). Let us note right away that there are differences in the approaches of psychogenetics and sociobiology. Sociobiology uses the achievements of ethology (the science of animal behavior in natural conditions, mainly genetically determined) to explain human social behavior. She compares the social behavior of animals and humans and finds similarities in certain mechanisms. The most common approach here is to compare behavioral patterns in human populations that differ sharply in cultural traditions. For example, the ability to smile or raise eyebrows when surprised is common to all human populations. It is natural to believe that such behavior is genetically determined, that there are genetically controlled repertoires of behavior. However, it is hardly worth transferring these conclusions to most aspects of behavior, as well as exaggerating the role of restrictions imposed by biology on social processes in humans. Psychogenetics, in contrast to human sociobiology, studies not the similarity of behavior in different populations, but individual human differences in the same populations - the subject of psychogenetics is the nature of individual human differences. Let us also add: psychogenetics studies primarily those mental and psychophysical properties of a person that can be reliably assessed and studied. In particular, the subject of research in our science, as is already clear from the previous text, often becomes the heritability and variability of deviant forms of behavior; mental illness; types of temperament; types of brain rhythms.

Right away, looking ahead a little, let’s say: the main method of psychogenetics is the twin method. He proceeds from the fact that only monozygotic twins have an identical set of genes and, therefore, in a situation of identical environmental conditions, the similarity within the pair should be greater than that of dizygotic twins. This method also explores the individual characteristics of people who are genetically identical, but brought up in different environments (the study of separated monozygotic twins). However, only combining the results obtained by different methods (there are also population, genealogical, adopted children methods, etc.) provides the most reliable information about the role and relationship of genetic and environmental components in the formation of human psychological characteristics.

• Genealogical method – study of similarities between relatives in different generations.

• The population method allows us to study the distribution of individual genes or chromosomal abnormalities in human populations.

To analyze the genetic structure of a population, it is necessary to examine a large group of individuals, which must be representative, that is, representative, allowing one to judge the population as a whole. This method is more informative when studying various forms of hereditary pathology.

Analysis of the heritability of normal psychological traits - this method, taken in isolation from others, does not provide reliable information, because differences between populations in the distribution of a particular psychological trait can be caused by social reasons, customs, etc.
The method of adopted children is a comparison of similarities on some psychological basis between a child and his biological parents, on the one hand, and the child and the adoptive parents who raised him, on the other.

All methods require mandatory statistical processing specific to each method. The most informative methods of mathematical analysis require the simultaneous use of at least the first two methods.

It is necessary to say something about such new branches of science as genetic psychophysiology and genetics of individual development.

Now let's return to the history of science. In the mid-50s of the XX century. There was a meeting between physicist engineer Champion Teutsch, who served in the war as a combat US air intelligence officer, and Joel Marie Noel, gifted with psychic abilities. In their endless conversations and debates, a new amazing science and/or practice was created - psychogenetics.

Before meeting Joel Champion, Teutsch persistently sought a means of explaining human behavior and ways to change it for the better: he studied the recognized classical directions of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy 3. Freud, C. Jung, B. Skinner, and studied cases of sporadic spiritual healing. However, psychoanalysts did not satisfy him, because the client’s healing process was long and unstable, and unique isolated cases lacked rationality and logic - their randomness and scientific groundlessness were simply alarming. However, the situation changed when D. Noel, who had a supernatural gift to influence the subconscious of clients and faith in the truth of goodness, the perfection of life and the ability to spiritually and psychologically change illnesses, failures, disappointments into positive states, showed her skills to Toich. What united them? Love, work, a miracle of communication and a miracle of abilities? Together they coped with cases in which traditional methods were powerless. They created a natural scientific basis for a new direction of psychotherapy associated with spiritual healing, and their concept was discussed and then received recognition in universities, clinics, and scientific symposia in many countries around the world.

Let’s try to understand the main idea of the creators of our scientific discipline: the genetic code, even before a person’s birth, determines most of his life prospects and almost all basic patterns of behavior (!). Information about the experiences of ancestors is stored along with information about appearance in the DNA molecule. Each person has a core internal direction, a unique combination of genetic, unconscious and conscious factors, according to which he moves through life, experiences and plays social roles - regardless of his own conscious reactions and interpretations. The vector of the main internal direction affects human behavior, success, and health.

Unconscious expectations, secret, dormant hostility for the time being, guilt, fear or the desire for death also attract potential partners. It is with them that man lives, wandering through the labyrinths of misunderstanding, illness and hatred, in the circles of, so to speak, hell. And nothing can be corrected by solving only specific problems, as is done in classical and modern directions of psychotherapy - in the biography of a person or his descendants, conflicts will be played out again and again - until his main life direction is changed. Psychogenetics states: until we ourselves are aware of the negative programs of our genetic code, we will, for the most part, remain victims of circumstances, chance encounters, and someone’s ill will. Awareness of the negative aspects of your genetic program helps you become masters of your life and create a new present and future well-being with your own hands, mind and will. Dr. Teutsch constructs a genogram, showing the causes and common roots of past experiences, the current situation and the future direction of development. A few sessions are usually enough to achieve significant progress in the client’s affairs... But all this is from the field of practice, pseudo-scientific theorizing, pop psychology, adventures of the mind and emotions in the vastness of the American prairies and skyscrapers...

Like every science, psychogenetics, the foundations of which we study, also has its own real history, complicated, confusing, sometimes versioned, and yet...

Formal-dynamic characteristics of personality and individuality! Today these include emotionality and abilities, reactions and behavior patterns, and much more, which is well known to specialists. Moreover, all this is actually diagnosed: according to the characteristics of behavior in existing or specially simulated life situations. We are different! The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians valued the position of a scribe very highly, but the tests were quite tough - applicants had to have many mandatory professionally significant qualities (by the way, those who did not pass the tests were not allowed again). Egyptian priests chose successors not only from their own families - all applicants underwent difficult trials. Ancient China left evidence of testing knowledge, skills and reactions to what was happening - and officials knew how to create a situation! The legendary scientist and magician Pythagoras attached great importance to how a young man entering his school behaves in emotionally intense moments that were specially created for them - how he reacts to ridicule and even bullying, how he behaves in public, how he communicates. A person’s character, Pythagoras believed, is manifested in both gait and laughter - by the way, the manner of laughing, from his point of view, is the best assistant in discovering character traits. The great Theophrastus described 30 bright characterological types and their specific manifestations. Scientists believe that Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen spoke about a large number of informative indicators that we now use in psychodiagnostics. Medieval scientists of the East - Avicenna, Al Biruni and others develop the thoughts of their great teachers and predecessors.

Since Antiquity, one way or another, there has been physiognomy - the doctrine of recognizing natural individual characteristics (character) based on the physical characteristics of a person, his appearance.

What about the handwriting? This is also an external manifestation, but what? The history of graphology dates back to ancient times and the first statements about the connection between handwriting and personality can be found in the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and others already listed above.

Actually, the beginning of the empirical, pre-scientific stage of development of graphology is usually associated with the appearance in 1622 of the work of the Italian C. Baldo, “Discourses on the way to recognize the customs and qualities of a writer from his letter.”

In the XVIII–XIX centuries. In France, Italy, Germany and Russia, there is a growing interest in the relationship between handwriting and the psychological characteristics of a person. Graphology is of interest to I. Goethe and C. Darwin, A. Humboldt, A. Dumas fils, J. Sand, W. Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, and later V. Solovyov, A. P. Chekhov and others. J. V. Goethe wrote : “Handwriting is directly connected with the whole being of a person, with the conditions of his life, work, with his nervous system, therefore our manner of writing bears the same undoubted material stamp of individuality as everything with which we come into contact.”

J. I. Michon is considered the founder of graphology as a science. In 1871, he made the first attempts to systematize the characteristic features of handwriting. He also coined the term graphology. Michon believed that handwriting contains features, each of which has a basic meaning indicating a personality trait. He was convinced that a graphically expressed and graphologically assessed trait leads directly and unambiguously to one or another personality trait. In the book “Secrets of Writing,” Michon noted the need to widely use graphology in the examination of writing. He believed that graphology should attract the attention of judicial workers to judge the nature of the accused, and he himself was involved as an expert to establish authorship. At the initiative of Michon, at the end of the 19th century, graphological societies were formed and special journals on graphology began to be published.

Issues of graphology were also covered in the works of C. Lombroso. In his opinion, the handwriting of a born criminal is characterized by special graphological features that indicate the hereditary criminal inclinations of their owner. Later, in Soviet criminology, Lombroso's anthropological direction was considered reactionary.

Biologist V. Preyer studied the physiology, psychology and pathology of writing, and experimented with writing under hypnosis. He suggested to a person under hypnosis that he was cunning, secretive, etc., and at the same time forced him to write from dictation. As a result, the handwriting in each case was different, completely different from the handwriting of a given person in his usual state and contained features interpreted by graphologists as signs of secrecy, cunning, etc. For example, the property of stinginess in handwriting is characterized by compressed writing, almost no or very little margins. small, etc.

A special role in graphological science belongs to L. Klages, who proceeded from the fact that a person’s character is reflected in any of his movements. Writing is a projection of consciousness in the form of various fixed movements, and handwriting is a fixed trace of movements and it should reflect the individual character of a person, which predetermines the individuality of handwriting. Movements when writing are automated, therefore they naturally express the internal impulses of a person, which can be recognized by such parameters of movements as speed, strength, rhythm, etc. L. Klages believed that the nature of each sign of handwriting is dual (later graphologists recognized it as polysemantic), and each sign has a negative and positive meaning.

Experimental psychology, which emerged in the mid-19th century, aimed to understand the general patterns of human behavior. Individual characteristics, as deviations from basic patterns, were considered as a hindrance, a source of inaccuracy in the description. A recognized authority in the field of differential psychology, A. Anastasi, believed that this attitude was reflected even in terminology: it was from the first experimental psychologists that we inherited the term “error,” used to denote a deviation from the average value (for example, “standard error”).

But the beginning of the scientific study of individuality is associated primarily with the names of the English scientist Francis Galton and the German scientist William Stern.

F. Galton was the first to make individual differences between people a special subject of study, created measurement procedures and the initial statistical apparatus for assessing differences; collected a large amount of experimental material concerning, as we would now say, different levels in the structure of individuality - somatic, physiological, psychological. Galton raised the question of the origin of individual characteristics and tried to solve it.

In 1900, V. Stern, in the book “On the Psychology of Individual Differences (Ideas for Differential Psychology),” first introduced the term “differential psychology” to designate a new field, “emancipated,” in his words, from its mother science – general psychology . The methodological and experimental approaches, basic concepts, and many statistical techniques formulated by Stern, despite the passage of almost 100-odd years, are still true today.

Let us assume that all of the above is the historical outline of our science - psychogenetics (it should be noted that in modern foreign scientific literature, which is published mainly in English, the term psychogenetics is practically not used - to designate this scientific discipline the name genetics of human behavior is usually used behavioral genetics). Some time ago, in the German-language scientific literature, one could also find other designations - in 1969, a manual on human genetics was published edited by P. Becker, one of the chapters of which was called Humangenetische Psychologic, which can be translated into Russian as psychogenetics. In 1982, a book by the German psychogeneticist F. Weiss was published, in which the area of knowledge that interests us is clearly designated as psychogenetik. In Russian psychology, the name psychogenetics has been firmly established to denote our discipline in higher education, although, as we said above, you can find the terms behavioral genetics or human behavior genetics, which are used interchangeably.

The “Big Explanatory Psychological Dictionary,” published in Russian in 2001, defines behavior as a generic term covering actions, activities, reactions, movements, processes, operations, etc., i.e., any measurable (emphasis added ) body reaction. But I. V. Ravich-Shcherbo, one of the leading psychologists, founder of the first psychogenetics laboratory in our country, emphasizes the inappropriateness of identifying all psychology with the science of behavior and believes that the field of knowledge that could be called psychological genetics is more correctly called psychogenetics , and not the genetics of human behavior, as is common in the West. We see that in our country our science is not always designated in the same way. In general, with the modern level of integration of science, one should adopt a designation that is generally accepted, so as not to speak different languages, however, for internal use, the familiar term psychogenetics should still be preserved, but it should be clearly agreed upon what content will stand behind this name.