Theoretical and clinical overview of affective temperaments in mood disorders

Temperaments are imperturbable variations of personality, traits and ways of reacting to the environment that characterize individuals and remain constant throughout several different situations. Temperaments usually play a central role in determining emotional reactions, therefore several temperamental models have attempted to establish the potential relationship between temperaments and affective disorders. According to Hagop Akiskal, affective temperaments are subclinical and subaffective trait-like manifestations of affective disorders. Unlike several models of temperament which were exclusively developed theoretically in order to describe healthy human functioning, later extrapolated to capture the pathological domains of mental and behavioral features, the current model of affective temperaments was developed on classical traditions and mainly based on the observation of subjects with mood disorders and their healthy first degree relatives. There is accumulating evidence concerning the development of affective temperaments based on their adaptive evolutionary characteristics and genetic background, and normative data from large national studies on general and healthy samples indicate their universal characteristics. Studies in affective 1 Department of Clinical and Theoretical Mental Health Semmelweis University; Department of Pharmacodynamics, Semmelweis University; Neuropsychopharmacology and Neurochemistry Research Group, National Academy of Sciences and Semmelweis University, Budapest; Laboratory for Suicide Research and Prevention, National Institute for Psychiatry and Addictions, Budapest, Hungary; [email protected] 2 Department of Neuroscience, University of Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina; International Consortium for Bipolar Disorders Research, Department of Psychiatry & Neuroscience Program, Harvard Medical School, Boston, McLean Division of Massachusetts General Hospital, Belmont, MA, USA Psicodebate, Vol. 14, No 2, Diciembre 2014 | ISSN: 1515–225 | 39–58