Novelty Seeking
Despite early findings of an association between the DRD4 48bp VNTR and novelty seeking (a characteristic of exploratory and excitable people), a 2008 meta-analysis compared 36 published studies of novelty seeking and the polymorphism and found no effect. The meta-analysis of 11 studies did find that another polymorphism in the gene, the -521C/T, showed an association with novelty seeking. In any case, novelty-seeking behavior is probably mediated by several genes, and the variance attributable to DRD4 by itself is not particularly large.
Read more about this topic: Dopamine Receptor D4
Famous quotes containing the words novelty and/or seeking:
“It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will ... is a shapeless world.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)