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. 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. 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. Dr. Cloninger is currently professor emeritus .
Cloninger is known for his research on the genetics, neurobiology, and development of personality and personality disorders. 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 also carried out the first genome-wide association and linkage study of normal personality traits, and has developed two widely used tools for measuring personality: the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) and the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI).
In 2004, he published Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being. 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.
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. 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.
Education and early research
Cloninger was born in Beaumont, Texas in 1944. 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. 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 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.
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. During the late 70s, Cloninger worked on modeling complex patterns of inheritance using path analysis to allow for both genetic and cultural inheritance. He extended path analysis with the introduction of the "copath" to facilitate the analysis of assortative mating and cultural inheritance. 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. 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. As a result, he shifted his efforts after 1980 to more compelling experimental designs, such as adoption and linkage studies.