I am interested in a cluster of traits and biomarkers that might converge toward a macro-trait we could call “proneness to crowd hysteria”.
People in this cluster would presumably be hypersensitive to context and social influences, prone to mass psychogenic illnesses and conversion disorders, be at higher risk of ideological extremism, and be highly receptive to cultural affordances.
Any leads?
Here are a few candidates traits ; not sure if any one of these would be sufficient for crowd hysteria.
(< = high; > = low)
Personality:
High in:
< social cognition
< empathy
< hypnotizability
< disgust avoidance
< external locus of control
< conscientiousness
< agreeableness
< neuroticism
< smartphone social media addiction
Low in:
> openness to experience
> need for cognition
> IQ
Genetics:
5HTTLPR - short S carriers
DRD4 - 7R carriers??
Vasopressin and oxytocin receptor polymorphisms?
Other biomarkers
Female sex (though clearly men are also at risk; prone to c.h. men don’t all appear to be more feminine)
High 2D/4D ratio
Ecological risk factors:
High-stress, high uncertainty environments
Rapidly shifting cultural norms
Increased resource scarcity and competitive pressures
Social media exposure
Loneliness
More difficult question:
Chaotic styles of interoceptive inference (predictive-processing) prompting search for meaning
Hypochondriasis?
Samuel Veissiere , good to hear from you. Exactly the kinds of things I'm thinking about in relation to a geneXenv study I'm considering, involving genes related to the things you mention and cultural consonance with valued cultural identities as predictors, with mental health outcomes. So, consonance would impact mental health more depending on one's attentiveness to social others. My sense is that for a variety of reasons polygenic risk scores are the way to go, rather than try to cobble together a lot of individual SNPs. Though I'd imagine the risk profile would include some of the alleles you mention above. So, we should pick out a trait like "conscientiousness" and see what the GWAS folks have found, what cluster of genes predict that trait. I follow a GWAS bot on Twitter, https://twitter.com/SbotGwa , apparently there's a GWAS profile and Manhattan plot for most every trait. Though we'd want to eventually unpack the social trait's black box, thinking about each individual gene in polygenic risk score.
Thank you so much Jeffrey G Snodgrass the non-candidate-driven GWAS approach seems like a great way to go. Beyond the UK biobank, do you know other other open access GWAS repositories. Looking at different GWAS sequences of different conditions that exhibit "context hypersensitivity" and looking for possible overlaps might yield interesting results.
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