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Journal of Developmental and Behavioral... Jun 2005Most temperament theories presume a biological basis to those behavioral tendencies thought to be temperamental in origin. Behavioral genetic methods can be used to test... (Review)
Review
Most temperament theories presume a biological basis to those behavioral tendencies thought to be temperamental in origin. Behavioral genetic methods can be used to test this assumption. Twin and adoption studies suggest that individual differences in infant and child temperament are genetically influenced. However, behavioral genetics has much more to offer to the study of temperament than simple heritability estimates. The present paper describes some recent findings from behavioral genetics research in temperament that go well beyond the basic nature-nurture question. These findings include the importance of nonshared environmental influences on temperament, genetic continuity and environmental change during development, links between temperament and behavior problems, and harnessing the power of molecular genetics to identify specific genes responsible for genetic influence on early temperament.
Topics: Adolescent; Child; Child, Preschool; Follow-Up Studies; Genetics, Behavioral; Genotype; Humans; Individuality; Infant; Personality; Quantitative Trait Loci; Research; Social Environment; Temperament; Twin Studies as Topic; Twins
PubMed: 15956873
DOI: 10.1097/00004703-200506000-00010 -
Annual Review of Genomics and Human... 2013The field of behavioral genetics has engendered a host of moral and social concerns virtually since its inception. The policy implications of a genetic basis for... (Review)
Review
The field of behavioral genetics has engendered a host of moral and social concerns virtually since its inception. The policy implications of a genetic basis for behaviors are widespread and extend beyond the clinic to the socially important realms of education, criminal justice, childbearing, and child rearing. The development of new techniques and analytic approaches, including whole-genome sequencing, noninvasive prenatal genetic testing, and optogenetics, has clearly changed the study of behavioral genetics. However, the social context of biomedical research has also changed profoundly over the past few decades, and in ways that are especially relevant to behavioral genetics. The ever-widening scope of behavioral genetics raises ethical, legal, social, and policy issues in the potential new applications to criminal justice, education, the military, and reproduction. These issues are especially critical to address because of their potentially disproportionate effects on vulnerable populations such as children, the unborn, and the incarcerated.
Topics: Behavioral Symptoms; Crime; Genetic Testing; Genetics, Behavioral; Genomics; Humans
PubMed: 23452225
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-genom-090711-163743 -
Behavior Genetics May 2014We begin this special issue by providing a glimpse into the career of Dr. Lindon J. Eaves, from the perspectives of a student, postdoc, instructor, assistant to...
We begin this special issue by providing a glimpse into the career of Dr. Lindon J. Eaves, from the perspectives of a student, postdoc, instructor, assistant to associate and full professor over the last 20 odd years. We focus primarily on Lindon's contributions to methodological issues and research designs to address them, in particular those related to models for extended twin-family designs, for the development of adolescent behavior, for genotype-environment covariation and interaction, and their application to the Virginia 30,000 and the Virginia Twin Study of Adolescent Behavioral Development. We then introduce the collection of papers in this special festschrift issue of Behavior Genetics, celebrating Dr. Eaves achievements over the last 40 years.
Topics: Adolescent; Adolescent Behavior; Genetic Association Studies; Genetics, Behavioral; History, 20th Century; History, 21st Century; Humans; Twin Studies as Topic; United States
PubMed: 24816433
DOI: 10.1007/s10519-014-9655-9 -
Genes, Brain, and Behavior Feb 2020The field of behavioral genetics has recently begun to explore the effect of age on social behaviors. Such studies are particularly important, as certain... (Review)
Review
The field of behavioral genetics has recently begun to explore the effect of age on social behaviors. Such studies are particularly important, as certain neuropsychiatric disorders with abnormal social interactions, like autism and schizophrenia, have been linked to older parents. Appropriate social interaction can also have a positive impact on longevity, and is associated with successful aging in humans. Currently, there are few genetic models for understanding the effect of aging on social behavior and its potential transgenerational inheritance. The fly is emerging as a powerful model for identifying the basic molecular mechanisms underlying neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. In this review, we discuss these recent advancements, with a focus on how studies in Drosophila melanogaster have provided insight into the effect of aging on aspects of social behavior, including across generations.
Topics: Aging; Animals; Behavior, Animal; Courtship; Drosophila melanogaster; Female; Genetics, Behavioral; Interpersonal Relations; Male; Models, Animal; Sexual Behavior, Animal; Social Behavior
PubMed: 31286644
DOI: 10.1111/gbb.12598 -
BMC Neuroscience Sep 2007This review focuses on behavioral genetic studies of sweet, umami, bitter and salt taste responses in mammals. Studies involving mouse inbred strain comparisons and... (Review)
Review
This review focuses on behavioral genetic studies of sweet, umami, bitter and salt taste responses in mammals. Studies involving mouse inbred strain comparisons and genetic analyses, and their impact on elucidation of taste receptors and transduction mechanisms are discussed. Finally, the effect of genetic variation in taste responsiveness on complex traits such as drug intake is considered. Recent advances in development of genomic resources make behavioral genetics a powerful approach for understanding mechanisms of taste.
Topics: Animals; Genetics, Behavioral; Humans; Taste; Taste Buds; Taste Threshold
PubMed: 17903279
DOI: 10.1186/1471-2202-8-S3-S3 -
Molecular Psychiatry Feb 2015Intelligence is a core construct in differential psychology and behavioural genetics, and should be so in cognitive neuroscience. It is one of the best predictors of... (Review)
Review
Intelligence is a core construct in differential psychology and behavioural genetics, and should be so in cognitive neuroscience. It is one of the best predictors of important life outcomes such as education, occupation, mental and physical health and illness, and mortality. Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits. Here, we highlight five genetic findings that are special to intelligence differences and that have important implications for its genetic architecture and for gene-hunting expeditions. (i) The heritability of intelligence increases from about 20% in infancy to perhaps 80% in later adulthood. (ii) Intelligence captures genetic effects on diverse cognitive and learning abilities, which correlate phenotypically about 0.30 on average but correlate genetically about 0.60 or higher. (iii) Assortative mating is greater for intelligence (spouse correlations ~0.40) than for other behavioural traits such as personality and psychopathology (~0.10) or physical traits such as height and weight (~0.20). Assortative mating pumps additive genetic variance into the population every generation, contributing to the high narrow heritability (additive genetic variance) of intelligence. (iv) Unlike psychiatric disorders, intelligence is normally distributed with a positive end of exceptional performance that is a model for 'positive genetics'. (v) Intelligence is associated with education and social class and broadens the causal perspectives on how these three inter-correlated variables contribute to social mobility, and health, illness and mortality differences. These five findings arose primarily from twin studies. They are being confirmed by the first new quantitative genetic technique in a century-Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis (GCTA)-which estimates genetic influence using genome-wide genotypes in large samples of unrelated individuals. Comparing GCTA results to the results of twin studies reveals important insights into the genetic architecture of intelligence that are relevant to attempts to narrow the 'missing heritability' gap.
Topics: Genetic Predisposition to Disease; Genetic Variation; Genetics, Behavioral; Genome-Wide Association Study; Genotype; Humans; Intelligence; Meta-Analysis as Topic; Phenotype
PubMed: 25224258
DOI: 10.1038/mp.2014.105 -
Behavior Genetics Mar 2023A century after the first twin and adoption studies of behavior in the 1920s, this review looks back on the journey and celebrates milestones in behavioral genetic... (Review)
Review
A century after the first twin and adoption studies of behavior in the 1920s, this review looks back on the journey and celebrates milestones in behavioral genetic research. After a whistle-stop tour of early quantitative genetic research and the parallel journey of molecular genetics, the travelogue focuses on the last fifty years. Just as quantitative genetic discoveries were beginning to slow down in the 1990s, molecular genetics made it possible to assess DNA variation directly. From a rocky start with candidate gene association research, by 2005 the technological advance of DNA microarrays enabled genome-wide association studies, which have successfully identified some of the DNA variants that contribute to the ubiquitous heritability of behavioral traits. The ability to aggregate the effects of thousands of DNA variants in polygenic scores has created a DNA revolution in the behavioral sciences by making it possible to use DNA to predict individual differences in behavior from early in life.
Topics: Genome-Wide Association Study; Genetics, Behavioral; Phenotype; Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; Multifactorial Inheritance
PubMed: 36662387
DOI: 10.1007/s10519-023-10132-3 -
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Oct 2021The field of human behavioral genetics has come full circle. It began by using twin/family studies to estimate the relative importance of genetic and environmental... (Review)
Review
The field of human behavioral genetics has come full circle. It began by using twin/family studies to estimate the relative importance of genetic and environmental influences. As large-scale genotyping became cost-effective, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) yielded insights about the nature of genetic influences and new methods that use GWAS data to estimate heritability and genetic correlations invigorated the field. Yet these newer GWAS methods have not replaced twin/family studies. In this review, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches with respect to characterizing genetic and environmental influences, measurement of behavioral phenotypes, and evaluation of causal models, with a particular focus on cognitive neuroscience. This discussion highlights how twin/family studies and GWAS complement and mutually reinforce one another.
Topics: Genetic Predisposition to Disease; Genome-Wide Association Study; Humans; Twins
PubMed: 34312064
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2021.06.007 -
Behavior Genetics Mar 2019While considerable research has examined how genetic explanations for behavior impact assessments of moral responsibility, results across studies have been inconsistent....
While considerable research has examined how genetic explanations for behavior impact assessments of moral responsibility, results across studies have been inconsistent. Some studies suggest that genetic accounts diminish ascriptions of responsibility, but others show no effect. Nonetheless, conclusions from behavior genetics are increasingly mobilized on behalf of defendants in court, suggesting a widespread intuition that this sort of information is relevant to assessments of blameworthiness. In this paper, we consider two sorts of reasons why this kind of intuition, if it exists, is not consistently revealed in empirical studies. On the one hand, people may have complex and internally conflicting intuitions about the relationship between behavior genetics and moral responsibility. On the other hand, it may be that people are motivated to think about the role of genetics in behavior differently depending on the moral valence of the actions in question.
Topics: Cognition; Genetics, Behavioral; Humans; Intuition; Morals; Perception
PubMed: 30094665
DOI: 10.1007/s10519-018-9916-0 -
Current Biology : CB Aug 2015
Topics: Australia; Biological Evolution; Conflict, Psychological; Ethology; Genetics, Behavioral; Genomic Imprinting; History, 20th Century; History, 21st Century; United States
PubMed: 26516638
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.002