Personality Similarity in Twins Reared Apart and Together
Heritability was a stronger predictor of personality traits than environment, but there was some role for environment on two of fourteen traits. From 1988.
Solely environmental models did not fit any of the scales. Although the other reduced models, including the simple additive model, did fit many of the scales, only the full model provided a satisfactory fit for all scales. Heritabilities estimated by the full model ranged from .39 to .58. Consistent with previous reports, but contrary to widely held beliefs, the overall contribution of a common family-environment component was small and negligible for all but 2 of the 14 personality measures. Evidence of significant nonadditive genetic effects, possibly emergenic (epistatic) in nature, was obtained for 3 of the measures.
As expected. Genetic Additive, Genetic Nonadditive, Shared Family Environment, and Unshared Environment were compared.
Just curious... has anyone ever considered that environment can have an "opposite" effect? For example, parents can be abusive, and this results in children being very (maybe overly) protective of their children. I am a bit of a neat freak, and I know exactly why: my mother was an absolute slob, terrible homemaker, to the point that I was embarrassed to bring friends home. The result was that I hate disorder, to the point of being almost obsessive about it. Could, for example, an extremely outgoing parent result in a child who reacts to that personality negatively, and becomes withdrawn? Seems like it would play havoc with your correlation.
ReplyDeleteYes personality is less clear than things like height of math ability isn't it? We might find people saying they don't want to be a musician because their father was one and they thought it was a terrible career, but not that they are bad at music because their father was good at it.
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