Book Review
Personality 
Psychobiology of Personality Marvin Zuckerman. New York (NY): Cambridge University Press; 2005. 322 p. US$50.00.
Reviewer
rating*: Good
Review by: John Livesley, MD
Vancouver, British Columbia
This volume provides an excellent review of current thinking and research on the biological basis of personality. Since the first edition of the book, which was published in 1991, the field has advanced significantly, both conceptually and methodologically. The new edition reviews these developments and places them in the context of previous work. This edition is a major revision of the first; more than one-half of the citations are to works published since the first edition went to press. The result is more than an update; it is a major reworking of the topic.
Zuckerman focuses on the trait structure of personality. While there are other components to personality— knowledge systems and information processing structures used to understand the self and the world are crucial—traits form an important framework around which other personality systems are organized. Moreover, the heritability of traits makes them an obvious starting point for developing an understanding of the biological substrates of personality.
Zuckerman also adopts what is usually called a top-down approach to understanding trait structure. A top-down approach first identifies a few higher-order constructs (in this case, 4 broad trait dimensions) and proceeds to decompose these constructs into their constituent traits and to explore their neurophysiologic, biochemical, and genetic correlates. Although I prefer a bottom-up approach in which higher-order structures are derived empirically from more specific traits, Zuckerman’s approach offers a useful way to explicate the underlying biology of traits.
Chapter 1 is a key chapter that examines temperament and trait structure in detail. To identify a consensus set of basic dimensions, he examines different models for representing traits. On the basis of a comparative analysis of 2-, 3-, 5-, and 7-factor models, Zuckerman concludes that 4 major factors are common to most systems: neuroticism and anxiety, extraversion and sociability, impulsive sensation seeking compared with constraint, and aggression and hostility compared with agreeableness. Many personality theorists would agree that 4 or 5 major factors underlie personality variation. There is, however, likely to be some dispute about Zuckerman’s characterization of some factors. Most contentious is the conceptualization of the factors labelled impulsive sensation seeking and aggressiveness. Perhaps, ironically, the continued dispute about trait structure demonstrates the importance of a psychobiological approach. Despite numerous studies spanning many decades, the higher-order structure of personality has not been resolved. It seems that factor analytic and psychometric studies alone are not likely to resolve this problem and that a clearer understanding of personality structure may depend on the ability to tie phenotypic traits to underlying biologic structures and mechanisms.
Chapter 2 offers an excellent and comprehensive overview of current psychobiologic methods in personality research. These range from behavioural and molecular genetics through central and peripheral psychophysiologic techniques to imaging and psychopharmacology. This chapter forms the basis of the following 4 chapters, each of which offers an in-depth analysis of one of the 4 basic traits as explicated by the various psychobiological methods.
The final chapter seeks to integrate findings across different disciplines to provide a richer conceptual understanding of personality traits and their origins. This is the least successful chapter because our understanding of the phenotypic and biological structures of personality is too fragmentary and incomplete to achieve an effective integration. Nevertheless, Zuckerman’s theoretical musings and speculations are interesting. He adopts an approach that compares human traits with behavioural analogues in other species. This prompts consideration of the evolutionary origins of personality traits. Zuckerman examines the notion that traits originated from mechanisms that evolved because they facilitated survival and reproduction in the ancestral environment. Some traits probably emerged because one or both extremes of these traits conferred an adaptive advantage. It is also possible that some traits are simply the byproducts of other adaptations and that others merely reflect noise in the system.
Although this is a valuable and informative work, it will largely appeal to the specialist—someone with a serious interest in normal and disordered personality. The text is dense and contains little information that clinicians can use in everyday practice. However, there are signs that this is likely to change. Thus far, psychiatry has paid scant attention to research on normal personality when formulating ideas about the nature and origins of disordered personality, but a rapproachment between the study of normal and disordered personality is occurring. Individual differences in personality disorder are increasingly recognized to represent extremes of normal personality variation. Evidence is also mounting that there are important etiologic relations between some of the basic dimensions of personality that Zuckerman examines and various Axis I syndromes, especially mood, anxiety, and substance abuse disorders. These developments are likely to force a reappraisal of older ideas about the relation between personality and psychopathology, and current conceptions of personality disorder.
*Reviewer
Rating Scale/ Échelle d’évaluation du réviseur
Excellent / Excellent
Very Good / Très bon
Good / Bon
Fair / Passable
Not recommended / Pas recommandé
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