The Success of Facial Expression Recognition by Carriers of Various Genotypes of the COMT, DRD4, 5HT2A, MAOA GENES

Abstract

The work is aimed at describing the relationship between the genes COMT, DRD4, 5HT2A, MAOA with the success of facial expression recognition. These genes play an important role in various emotional and cognitive processes. At the same time, hereditary aspects of recognition of facial expressions, in contrast to sociocultural ones, have not been studied enough to date. The study involved 87 healthy students of Russian universities (20.4 ± 2.6 years). DNA analysis was carried out with the determination of genotypes by the polymorphic loci of the genes rs4680 COMT, rs6313 5HT2A (HTR2A), rs1800955 DRD4, VNTR MAOA (RSMU, Rostov-on-Don). The participants of the study were asked to distinguish emotional facial expressions in photographs taken from the MMI, KDEF, Rafd, WSEFEP image databases. The obtained results indicate the following differences in the success of facial expression recognition: carriers of the Val/Val genotype of the COMT gene significantly better recognize the emotions of surprise (H=7.7, df=2, p=0.02), fear (H=10.5, df=2, p=0.005), sadness (H=11.2, df=2, p=0.004); carriers of the heterozygous C/T genotype of the DRD4 gene significantly better recognize facial expression of disgust (H=9.1, df=2, p=0.01). No relationship was found between the MAOA gene genotypes and the success of emotion recognition.