Pharmacology and psychology in clinical practice

Psychology

The Link between Personality Traits and the Brain's Neurotransmitters

Purpose of Paper/Introduction/Background

My paper will be examining the links between personality traits and the brain's neurotransmitters. I plan to address this topic by looking at different personality traits and how they are linked to the brains neurotransmitters. I will also look at how this then leads to psychological disorders and how these are being treated with psychotropics. I will also compare this treatment method with unconventional and alternative treatments while looking at potential future developments and influences.

Some of the issues that I have identified are: that although personality may be inherent, it expands, through enduring occurrence, over ones lifetime. Personality is a multifaceted collection of behaviors, coping approaches, and defenses against apparently integrated vulnerabilities and while some are used to thinking of personality as something that is fashioned by early occurrences, mainly with parents and other caretakers, researchers are now learning detailed genetic and biologic features that influence ordinary personality and may play a vital role in the advance of personality disorder.

With this research I intend to explore how personality traits are linked to neurotransmitters in the brain and how this connection can lead to psychiatric disorders being treated with psychotropics. I chose this topic because I am very interested in how the brain works and how it is connected to psychiatric disorders. I think it is important to study this topic so that I can further my knowledge and advance my career.

Goals/Objectives

The goal of this study is to investigate the link between personality traits and the neurotransmitters and determine if the use of psychotropic drugs is the best treatment for people who suffer from psychiatric disorders. This will be done by comparing the use of psychotropic drugs with other alternative treatments.

Literature Review

Serotonin and dopamine neurotransmitter systems are mixed up in the regulation of frame of mind, understanding and personality traits and their malfunction is thought to be concerned in varied psychopathologies. On the other hand it has been seen that in healthy people the relationship between the serotonin and dopamine systems and neuropsychological functioning and personality traits is not visible. In a study done by Burke, van de Giessen, de Win, Schilt, van Herk, van den Brink & Booij (2011), it was investigated whether or not neuropsychological functioning, personality traits and mood status of a group of healthy people was associated with in vivo measures of serotonin transporters (SERT's) and dopamine transporters (DAT's). The conclusion was that there was some degree of association present.

In order to look at the connection between personality traits and neurotransmitters it is important to understand how neurotransmitters work. The white matter of a person's brain is made up of neurons and nerves that run throughout the body. These are essentially just dedicated cells with very long extensions which are sometimes a meter or more in length. Electrical impulses travel down the thin nerve fibers, which permit the neuron to let go of some of these tiny vesicle sacs and emit chemical contents into the synapse, which is a gap that subsists between the nerve ending and the next neuron. The chemicals then trickle over to the adjacent neuron, sometimes causing it to let off. This fundamental process of neurotransmission is carried out many by the ten billion or so neurons in the brain. A number of neurons are so lively that they let off as many as one hundred times per second, necessitating devices to uphold these elevated rates. The vesicles have a fundamental role in this progression because they allow neurons to let off when ready. Neurons utilize the vesicles to bundle the chemicals and move them in ahead of time so that they can let loose as soon as an electrical impulse is present. Since the release sites are not near the cell center, the vesicles must reprocess close by in order to continue their high rates of release (Nuance to Neurons, 2011).

According to Levine (2005), the arrangement of temperament and personality is made up of a rather small number of higher-order traits. Higher-order traits reveal emotional-motivational systems that have developed to increased variation to classes of stimuli connected with positive and negative support. Personality disorders can be understood as reflecting pathological amplifications of personality trait profiles. A lot of researchers have consequently supported, at least in principle, the development of a dimensional model that can describe both normal traits as well as personality disorders. Another reason for accepting such a model is that research has not come up with any reliable biological factors that associate with the present categories of personality disorders, whereas many studies have shown relationships between trait dimensions and measures of brain function (Paris, 2005).