Hereditary Pessimism: Seeing the Negative Side of Things Can Be Genetic

Are you a positive person, up and up or do you always have a backseat with everything, suspicious and pessimistic? If you answered that you have a profile that carries pessimism in various aspects of life, be aware that this may be genetic in origin.

According to Knowledge Nuts, the tendency to focus on the negative side of events is a characteristic of gene variation, similar to those that define hair and eye color. Some people are born to be pessimistic and cannot escape it; It's in the blood, in the DNA.

"Oh life! Oh, bad luck! ”

If you keep complaining about how Hanna Barbera's famous (and very old) character Hardy, who was a pessimistic hyena, you may have a specific genetic variation that causes this behavior. Research has shown that about 32% of the population is born with a mutation in the ADRA2B gene, a change that forces those affected to remember negative experiences more vividly than positive ones.

In addition, as a side effect, they also have a tendency to brood over their negative experiences. It's that old cup story. For these people, it is always half empty or probably cracked.

The ADRA2B gene is involved in a very specific function: it detects and stores chemical signals from memories that have an emotional impact. It influences the way memory has been stored emotionally and how it can be retrieved later.

For example, if you had a car accident when you were a child, ADRA2B is the reason why memory comes back so clearly. But when you think about what you ate for breakfast yesterday, the memory is not so clear, because it was not an emotional factor.

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In most people, the tendency to perceive something emotional is the same, and it is easy to discern between good and bad. But for people with the ADRA2B variant, their brains catch negative signals more easily than positive ones.

And all these perceptions were found in a recent survey released in the journal Nature. When researchers at the University of British Columbia gathered 200 volunteers to test the effect, they found that people with ADRA2B consistently focused on negative stimuli.

To achieve this result, there was a fairly simple test to be done. Eighty-four words were shown in front of the volunteers, one at a time for a fraction of a second each.

For most people, recognizing a single word in a fraction of a second after another is difficult due to a phenomenon called “blinking”. But if the word has an emotional burden on the individual, the brain can pick it up faster.

At the end of the test, the volunteers were asked to remember as many words as possible. So the result showed that people with a normal ADRA2B gene (no mutation) remembered the positive and negative words as well. But among people with ADRA2B genetic variation, the remembered words were overwhelmingly negative.

At the rate at which words were shown, they did not consciously choose negative ones — their pessimistic brains are better at perceiving them. But there is a bright side to this mutation: even though those carrying this mutation in the gene are more pessimistic, they also have a better overall memory.