The likelihood that a behavioral measure will elucidate a mechanistic cascade from cellular-molecular processes to clinical phenomena is higher if there is evidence that it is heritable. Social cognition measures, including emotion identification, have been applied in large-scale genetic studies where they were examined as candidate endophenotypic measures (Knowles et al., 2015). In several collaborative studies we have shown that heritability for emotion identification is significant and at least similar in magnitude to that observed for neurocognitive measures.
