Thursday, February 19, 2015

Could a blood test determine your job application?



If your future employer wants you to take on a role that could be demanding and challenging, could a blood test be required to predict your response to anger and fear?

It may be possible in the future. 

A recent study published February 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicated that individuals with lower DNA methylation show diminished brain response to angry and fearful faces and greater communication between brain regions important for regulating emotion. 

Perhaps discovering multiple types of markers could even result in a kind of emotion-predisposition dashboard, predicting problems and prompting interventions.

To arrive at this result, the University of Virginia study evaluated sample of 98 healthy Caucasians aged 18 to 30 who provided blood samples and underwent functional MRI brain scans while looking at pictures of angry and fearful faces.

Interesting definitely.  But how could such a test be used in the future, that is the big question.  When considering who to marry or live with? Employment screening? 

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