Claude Robert Cloninger (born April 4, 1944) is an American psychiatrist and geneticist noted for his research on the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual foundation of both mental health and mental illness.Highly Cited Researchers. Claude Robert Cloninger. Version 1.5, ISI Highly Cited.com. Institute for Scientific Information, 2008. He previously held the Wallace Renard Professorship of Psychiatry, and served as professor of psychology and genetics, as well as director of the Sansone Family Center for Well-Being at Washington University in St. Louis.Washington University, Division of Biology & Biomedical Sciences, http://dbbs.wustl.eduWashington University Physicians, Department of Psychiatry, http://wuphysicians.wustl.edu Cloninger is a member of the evolutionary, neuroscience, and statistical genetics programs of the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences at Washington University, and is recognized as an expert clinician in the treatment of general psychopathology, substance dependence, and personality disorders.Hellinga G, van Luyn B, Dalwijk H-J (eds.). Personalities: Master Clinicians Confront the Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. Robert Cloninger (biography and interview). Northvale NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 2001, pp. 99-120. Dr. Cloninger is currently professor emeritus .
Cloninger is known for his research on the genetics, neurobiology, and development of personality and personality disorders.Highly Cited Researchers. Claude Robert Cloninger. Version 1.5, ISI Highly Cited.com. Institute for Scientific Information, 2008.5. Hellinga G, van Luyn B, Dalwijk H-J (eds.). Personalities: Master clinicians confront the treatment of borderline personality disorder – Robert Cloninger (biography and interview). Northvale NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 2001, pp. 99-120. He identified and described heritable personality traits predictive of vulnerability to alcoholism and other mental disorders in prospective studies of adoptees reared apart from their biological parents.Cloninger CR, Bohman M, Sigvardsson S. Inheritance of alcohol abuse: cross-fostering analysis of adopted men. Archives of General Psychiatry 1981; 38:861-869.Cloninger CR, Bohman M, Sigvardsson S. Childhood personality predicts alcohol abuse in young adults. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 1988; 12:494-505.Cloninger CR, von Knorring A-L, Sigvardsson S, Bohman M. Symptom patterns and causes of somatization in men. Genetic Epidemiology 1986; 3:171-185. Cloninger also carried out the first genome-wide association and linkage study of normal personality traits,Cloninger CR, van Eerdewegh P, Goate A, et al. Anxiety proneness linked to epistatic loci in genome scan of human personality traits. Am J Med Genet 1998; 81:313-317. and has developed two widely used tools for measuring personality: the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) and the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI).Cloninger CR. A systematic method for clinical description and classification of personality variants. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1987; 44:573-588.11. Cloninger CR, Svrakic DM, Przybeck TR. A psychobiological model of temperament and character. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1993; 50:975-990.
In 2004, he published Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being.Cloninger CR. Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cloninger serves as director of the Anthropedia Institute, the research branch of the Anthropedia Foundation. In collaboration with Anthropedia, he helped develop the Know Yourself DVD series.http://anthropedia.org and http://psychobiology.wustl.edu
Cloninger has earned lifetime achievement awards from many academic and medical associations, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.Who's Who in the World 2009. Claude Robert Cloninger. 26th edition. New Providence, NJ. Marquis Who's Who, 2008. He has authored or co-authored nine books and more than four hundred and fifty articles, and is a highly cited psychiatrist and psychologist recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). He has served in an editorial capacity on many journals, including Behavior Genetics, American Journal of Human Genetics, Archives of General Psychiatry, Comprehensive Psychiatry, and the Mens Sana Monographs.Hon Int Adv Board Member, Mens Sana Monographs
Education and early research
Cloninger was born in Beaumont, Texas in 1944.Hellinga G, van Luyn B, Dalwijk H-J (eds.). Personalities: Master clinicians confront the treatment of borderline personality disorder. Robert Cloninger (biography and interview). Northvale NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 2001, pp. 99-120.Biographical report on Cloninger, in Bishop JE, Waldholz M, Genome. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990, pp. 249-266. His father Morris Cloninger was a former English teacher and businessman, and his mother Concetta was a former actress who directed the local community theater. He attended the University of Texas in Austin from 1962 to 1966 in the Plan II Honors program.Hellinga G, van Luyn B, Dalwijk H-J (eds.). Personalities: Master clinicians confront the treatment of borderline personality disorder Robert Cloninger (biography and interview). Northvale NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 2001, pp. 99-120. In addition to pre-medical studies, he studied philosophy, cultural anthropology, and psychology for which he received honors.
Cloninger attended a research-intensive medical school at Washington University in St. Louis from 1966 to 1970, and has remained on the faculty there throughout his career. In addition to regular medical training, he did a research fellowship in preventive medicine and public health. He began research in psychiatry in 1969 under the guidance of Samuel Guze.Cloninger CR. In Memoriam – Samuel B. Guze: October 18, 1923 – July 19, 2000. Am J Med Genet 2001; 105:1-3. Cloninger wanted to understand why antisocial personality disorder, substance dependence, and somatization disorder were so often found together in the same individual and in the same family. This question led to longitudinal studies of people with each of these disorders and then family and adoption studies.Cloninger CR, Reich T, Guze SB. The Multifactorial Model of Disease Transmission: III. Familial Relationship between Sociopathy and Hysteria (Briquet's Syndrome). Br J Psychiatry 1975; 127:23-32.
In order to better quantify and test hypotheses about the inheritance of psychiatric disorders, he studied quantitative genetics with Theodore Reich in St. Louis and with Newton Morton and D.C. Rao of the Population Genetics Lab of the University of Hawaii.CR Cloninger – 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award: announcement and biographical citation. Am J Med Genet 2004; 126: 128. During the late 70s, Cloninger worked on modeling complex patterns of inheritance using path analysis to allow for both genetic and cultural inheritance.Cloninger CR, Rice J, Reich T. Multifactorial inheritance with cultural transmission and assortative mating. II. A general model of combined polygenic and cultural inheritance. American Journal of Human Genetics 1979; 31:176-198. He extended path analysis with the introduction of the "copath" to facilitate the analysis of assortative mating and cultural inheritance.Cloninger CR. Interpretation of intrinsic and extrinsic structural relations by path analysis: Theory and applications to assortative mating. Genetical Research, Cambridge 1980; 36:122-145. He worked to develop methods for disentangling genetic, cultural, and other environmental influences on mental disorders until he concluded that such statistical modeling would never convince skeptics or provide precise estimates when biological parents also reared their own children.Cloninger CR, Rice J, Reich T. Multifactorial inheritance with cultural transmission and assortative mating. III. Family structure and the analysis of separation experiments. American Journal of Human Genetics 1979; 31:366-388. His clinical studies of psychiatric disorders also revealed much complexity in the clinical features of mental disorders: people often had multiple overlapping syndromes and changed over time in unpredictable ways.Maser JD & Cloninger CR (eds). Comorbidity of mood and anxiety disorders. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1990. As a result, he shifted his efforts after 1980 to more compelling experimental designs, such as adoption and linkage studies.
Work Stockholm adoption study
The answer to the need for better data about separation experiments came in the form of a long-term collaboration between Cloninger and Michael Bohman, the head of child psychiatry at the University of Umea in Sweden. Bohman had read some of Cloninger's papers on the analysis of separation experiments and asked for Cloninger's assistance in his own research. For several years, Bohman had been studying the behavior of a large birth cohort of children born in Stockholm. The children had been separated from their biological parents at birth and reared in adopted homes. Extensive data about alcohol abuse, criminality, and physical and mental complaints to physicians were available in Sweden as a result of the extensive health and social records for all people in the country. Cloninger developed methods for what he called a "cross-fostering" analysis. Information about the genetic background of adoptees was measured by data about their biological parents. Information about their rearing environment was measured by data about their adoptive parents and home environment. This permitted study of the independent contributions of the genetic and environmental backgrounds independently and in combination in a sample of thousands of adoptees. Their first joint paper on a cross-fostering analysis of the inheritance of alcoholism in men became an ISI Science Citation Classic that convinced most scientists that vulnerability to alcoholism was genetically heritable in part.
Cloninger, Bohman, and Soren Sigvardson distinguished two subtypes of alcoholism that differed in their clinical features and pattern of inheritance: type 1, associated with anxiety proneness and loss of control over alcohol intake after age 25; and type 2, associated with impulsivity and antisocial behavior before age 25.Cloninger CR. Neurogenetic adaptive mechanisms in alcoholism. Science 1987; 236:410-416. Cloninger proposed that the differences between these two groups of people were explained by personality traits that were observable in childhood, long before any exposure to alcohol. He confirmed this by measuring the personality of boys when they were in the fourth grade, about 10 years of age, based on detailed interviews with their teachers and without any knowledge of their drinking status as adults. The personality ratings of Cloninger were based on his tridimensional model of temperament. The personality model also helped the team to understand other findings they obtained about the inheritance of criminal behavior, somatization (i.e., many physical complaints), anxiety, and depressive disorders. The original findings were later confirmed by a replication study using the same methods conducted in Gothenburg, Sweden.Sigvardsson S, Bohman M, Cloninger CR. Replication of the Stockholm Adoption Study of alcoholism: Confirmatory cross-fostering analysis. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1996; 53:681-687. Overall, these adoption studies provided strong evidence for the contribution of both genetic and environmental influences on vulnerability to alcoholism, somatization, criminality, anxiety, and depressive disorders. Without this research the general public would have never known that both genetic and environmental factors play a role in these conditions.
Temperament and character inventory