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Neurological Correlates: Of Sloths and Men and Vasopressin
By swivelchair | September 24, 2007
This is not a European male between 20 and 74 years.
The Seven Deadly Sins-a-rama continues with sloth, but first, I’m going to sit on the couch and watch TV. The person of the other gender who lives in my household in Europe will do my housework and take care of my kids. That’s because I have a short-form arginine vasopressin 1A receptor promoter, so what did you expect? Altruism? No way, I’m a born mooch.
Looking at slothfulness in a social context, if you’re sitting around, by default, someone else is picking up the slack. This is the opposite of altruism, it is exploitation.
(Let’s put to the side depression, illness or other diagnosable conditions which require relative immobility).
Be that as it may, a study just came out, “The Social Situation in Europe 2005-2006: The Balance Between Generations in an Ageing Europe“, (on Docuticker), and, not surprisingly, women shoulder most of the work on the domestic front, to the benefit of men who are in the household. (Graphs, click to view)
Is this something hardwired into women and/or men? What are the neurological correlates of that?
My theory is that if you take away the background noise — maternal bonding with babies and small children — and just look at no-child households or older children households, the men who are mooching have a short-form of the vasopressin receptor promoter — low on altruism, high on self-interest. And I bet an equal number of women would be mooches, too. (Unless there is some kind of skewing so that mostly men have this DNA variant.)
Like prairie voles, vasopressin is important for bonding with humans. The “on switch” for one of the vasopressin receptor genes can have repetitive pieces of DNA in it, and the “long form” has the most of these extra DNA repeats (which I think is really interesting, and wonder if this is similar to Barbara McClintock’s work with controlling elements in Indian Corn).
The arginine vasopressin 1A receptor promoter regions (the part for expressing the gene) have to do with social bonding — the longer the promoter region, the more you bond, and, this was recently correlated with a test for altruism. (The “dictator game:” a person is given money to give out to another person. The more money given to another (under various conditions, such as giving an explanation or not), the more altruistic the subject is said to be.)
Knafo et al, Genes Brain Behav. 2007 Aug 13; [Epub ahead of print] “Individual differences in allocation of funds in the dictator game associated with length of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 promoter region and correlation between RS3 length and hippocampal mRNA.” (Full citation with all authors names and institution after the jump).
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Human altruism is a widespread phenomenon that puzzled evolutionary biologists since Darwin. Economic games illustrate human altruism by showing that behavior deviates from economic predictions of profit maximization. A game that most plainly shows this altruistic tendency is the Dictator Game. We hypothesized that human altruistic behavior is to some extent hardwired and that a likely candidate that may contribute to individual differences in altruistic behavior is the arginine vasopressin 1a (AVPR1a) receptor that in some mammals such as the vole has a profound impact on affiliative behaviors. In the current investigation, 203 male and female university students played an online version of the Dictator Game, for real money payoffs. All subjects and their parents were genotyped for AVPR1a RS1 and RS3 promoter-region repeat polymorphisms. Parents did not participate in online game playing. As variation in the length of a repetitive element in the vole AVPR1a promoter region is associated with differences in social behavior, we examined the relationship between RS1 and RS3 repeat length (base pairs) and allocation sums. Participants with short versions (308-325 bp) of the AVPR1a RS3 repeat allocated significantly (likelihood ratio = 14.75, P = 0.001, df = 2) fewer shekels to the ‘other’ than participants with long versions (327-343 bp). We also implemented a family-based association test, UNPHASED, to confirm and validate the correlation between the AVPR1a RS3 repeat and monetary allocations in the dictator game. Dictator game allocations were significantly associated with the RS3 repeat (global P value: likelihood ratio chi(2) = 11.73, df = 4, P = 0.019). The association between the AVPR1a RS3 repeat and altruism was also confirmed using two self-report scales (the Bardi-Schwartz Universalism and Benevolence Value-expressive Behavior scales). RS3 long alleles were associated with higher scores on both measures. Finally, long AVPR1a RS3 repeats were associated with higher AVPR1a human post-mortem hippocampal messenger RNA levels than short RS3 repeats (one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA): F = 15.04, P = 0.001, df = 14) suggesting a functional molecular genetic basis for the observation that participants with the long RS3 repeats allocate more money than participants with the short repeats. This is the first investigation showing that a common human polymorphism, with antecedents in lower mammals, contributes to decision making in an economic game. The finding that the same gene contributing to social bonding in lower animals also appears to operate similarly in human behavior suggests a common evolutionary mechanism.
PMID: 17696996 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
“The Social Situation in Europe 2005-2006: The Balance Between Generations in an Ageing Europe“, (on Docuticker) page 15 :
2.6. The shift to the two-breadwinner model is not yet reflected in the time-use patterns of women and men over recent decades it has become the norm for married women and mothers to be in employment. This shift from the single to the two-breadwinner model could be expected to lead to more similar time use atterns for men and women. However, as charts 10 show, on an average working day adult women (between 20 and 74 years) still spend far more time on unpaid work, notably on domestic duties, than adult men. When both paid and unpaid work is taken together, women appear to carry out marginally more work than men (28% of their time for women and 27% for men). As women also sleep slightly more than men do, they enjoy slightly less free time than men (21% of total time for women and 23% for men).
Men in most Member States continue to make a limited contribution to domestic and parental tasks. According to a Eurobarometer survey of 2004, 84% of men had not taken parental leave or did not intend to do so, even when informed of their rights. The gap between men and women in terms of employment and domestic work is highest among couples with children, in particular for households with young children (up to 6 years). Three quarters of the physical childcare for a child under the age of six between 1 hour 30′ and 2 hours) is carried out by women. As the child grows older the time needed for childcare declines, but women continue to shoulder a larger share of domestic duties. The fact of living in a couple, even childless, appears to lengthen the time spent on domestic duties (notably cooking, washing and cleaning), and this more for women (1 extra hour) than for men (half an hour)
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Topics: Altruism/moral behavior, Bonding, Seven deadly sins, genetics, greed, prairie voles, sloth |
