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Authors' Non-technical Summary

Posted by Roe_30 on 20 Aug 2009 at 13:11 GMT

Risk attitudes affect a broad array of economic, safety and social decisions made by humans. Given the emerging understanding of risk taking in the fields of economics, psychology and neurology, attention is now turning to possible genetic factors that contribute to individual heterogeneity in risk attitudes. Most previous work that associates risk attitudes to genetic variation has focused on risk attitude measurements developed by psychologists and has focused on variation in genes that affect the transport and reception of dopamine and serotonin in neural synapses. We broaden this effort by including risk attitude measures used by both psychologists and economists. Less work has focused on economic measures despite increased interest in such an approach. We also broaden past efforts by examining variations in genes that may affect how dopamine and serotonin are synthesized and metabolized. Our work reveals an association between harm avoidance, a popular risk attitude measure from psychology, and two variations in the gene that encodes the nicotine receptor. Genetic variation in nicotine receptors could provide another mechanism to influence neural dopamine transmission, which is critical in human decision making under risk. Genetic variations in nicotine receptors have been previously associated with human ability to control impulses and cigarette smoking.

Competing interests declared: Per PLoSONE's suggestion, the authors are providing a lay summary of the article as a general comment.
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