resilience vs sensitivity

Justice embedded in your genes. The further you fall the more potential energy you can mobilize to climb back.

In 2010, a team of researchers launched a research study, called the Strong African American Families project, or SAAF, in an impoverished rural belt in Georgia. It is a startlingly bleak place overrun by delinquency, alcoholism, violence, mental illness, and drug use. Abandoned clapboard houses with broken windows dot the landscape; crime abounds; vacant parking lots are strewn with hypodermic needles. Half the adults lack a high school education, and nearly half the families have single mothers.

Six hundred African-American families with early-adolescent children were recruited for the study. The families were randomly assigned to two groups. In one group, the children and their parents received seven weeks intensive education, counseling, emotional support, and structured social interventions focused on preventing alcoholism, binge behaviors, violence, impulsiveness, and drug use. In the control group, the families received minimal interventions. Children in the intervention group and in the control group had the 5HTTLPR gene sequenced.

The first result of this randomized trial was predictable from prior studies: in the control group, children with the short variant - i.e. the high risk" form of the gene - were twice as likely to veer toward high-risk behaviors, including binge drinking, drug use, and sexual promiscuity as adolescents, confirming earlier studies that had suggested an increased risk within this genetic subgroup. The second result was more provocative: These very children were also the most likely to respond to the social interventions. In the intervention group, children with the high-risk allele were most strongly and rapidly "normalized" - i.e. the most drastically affected subjects were also the best responders. In a parallel study, orphaned infants with the short variant of 5HTTLPR appeared more impulsive and socially disturbed than their long-variant counterparts at baseline - but were also the most likely to benefit from placement in a more nurturing foster-care environment.

In both cases, it seems, the short variant encodes a hyperactive "stress sensor" for psychic susceptibility, but also a sensor most likely to respond to an intervention that targets the susceptibility. The most brittle or fragile forms of psyche are the most likely to be distorted by trauma-inducing environments—but are also the most likely to be restored by targeted interventions. It is as if resilience itself has a genetic core: Some humans are born resilient (but are less responsive to interventions), while others are born sensitive (but more likely to respond to changes in their environments).

The Gene - Siddhartha Mukherjee (Pages 459-460)

Injustice has environmental origins. Under equal conditions, both sensitive and resilient types should on average experience the same elevation.