PSYCH 2AA3 Child Development Thursday, September 15, 2016

TOPIC: GENES AND COMPLEX TRAITS

Most psychological traits (i.e.: personality, intelligence, etc.) are multi-genetic

o Meaning multiple genes are interacting to produce traits; and not each genotype can be
pin-pointed
o Certain methodologies need to be conducted to accommodate this for understanding
the complexity of multi-genetic

STUDIES:

Adoption Studies
o Find someone who is adopted, compare their traits to both their biological family (if
possible) and their adoptive family
o Reasoning: If they are more similar to their adopted family; then environment is playing
a very large role in the specific traits development
If more similar to their biological family, then their genes are more responsible
for development rather then the environment
Family Studies
o Compare relatedness with concordance on some trait (meaning: how similar they are)
o Example: schizophrenia; what is the likelihood of a family member having schizophrenia
in comparison with other family members
If concordance gets higher with more relatedness, then you can imagine that
biology is playing a role in that trait
Twin Studies
o Look at people with the same cohort (twin pairs born at the same time)
o Looking at concordance rates in them
o Example: one twin with schizophrenia, study to see if the other twin does have it too
o Look at both monozygotic twins (almost entirely 100% the same) and dizygotic twins
(not identical but conceived at the same time so they are twins)
o Can also look at twins reared together (shared environment) or look at twins apart
If they are equally concordant on some trait and in different environments, then
that trait is based off of their genetics more
Vice versa for the environment; so if they are dissimilar and raised apart then it
is because of the influence of the environment

ADOPTION STUDY: EXTRAVERSION

Extraversion people who enjoy lots of excitement

Find some adoptees for participants; and measure their personality
You are also going to measure the personality of their adopted family and the biological family
if possible
o Results: the child adopted away from its biological mother is actually very similar to its
biological mother in extroversion
The children are significantly different from their adopted mother
Results suggest that extroversion probably has a relatively large genetic
causation
PSYCH 2AA3 Child Development Thursday, September 15, 2016

These adopted children are more biologically related to their biological children
in extroversion (who did not raise them) in contrast to their adopted parents
who raised them
o If you look at IQ of adopted children; their IQ matches the adopted parents more then
the biological parent at a young age. But; when they are adults their IQ is more
concordant with their biological parents in contrast to their adopted parents.
o This intelligence data tells us that environment has a large impact on intelligence in
childhood, but in adulthood it appears to be that the genes have more of an influence

Adoption Studies essentially comparing adopted children and the traits you wish to study, with
both their biological and non-biological parents

FAMILY/TWIN STUDY: SCHIZOPHRENIA

Try to test several members of a family on a given trait

Example: schizophrenia what are the relative impacts of nature and nurture on the
development of a given trait
Obtain a baseline estimate of your trait (in comparison with the general population); concerned
with the genes that are shared between the human species
General population
o Same risk as anybody else in the general population you have no shared genes with
roughly 1%
You could also look at somewhat related people such as cousins
o Risk increases slightly
Look at people with more genetic relatedness (25% overlap)
o Slight increase again
50% relatives parents, children, siblings, dizygotic twins
o The concordance rates increase even more
Monozygotic twins (100%)
o Almost 3x concordant on the given trait
RESULTS: The more related you are to someone (shared genes) the higher concordance rate you
have for sharing a particular trait

TWIN CONCORDANCE RATES: PSYCHIATRIC DISRODERS

Among monozygotic twins: much more similar/concordant with a given trait (i.e.: anxiety
disorder, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, major depression, panic disorder) Data amongst dizygotic
twins is much lower and less concordant
o Indicates that genes do have a large influence and importance, however it isnt entirely
genes because if it were the twins would have duplicate risk but this indicates that the
environment too does have an impact
o Suggesting that environmental and biological factors are both involved in the
development of traits
PSYCH 2AA3 Child Development Thursday, September 15, 2016

TWIN STUDY CAVEAT

How similar are these environments?

o Do MZ and DZ have the exact same environments?
MZ generally share the placenta in utero
DZ generally have separate placentas in utero
MZ 1 egg 1 sperm in utero
DZ 2 eggs and 2 sperms in utero
o The placenta is very important as essentially that is the babys environment in the
uterus; thus in this uterus the placentas can be different for DZ but the same for MZ

After birth;

Generally, people treat MZ twins the same i.e.: dressing them the same etc.
DZ twins have different environments because for example they could be opposite sexes
For MZ it is very hard to interpret data because although their genes are similar most of the
time during early childhood they are treated the same (producing the same environment
generally)

TWINS REARED APART

Meaning twins born together but separated at birth and raised by different families
Post natal rearing environment:
o Minnesota twin study; twins are found and recruited to participate in behavioural
genetics research. Found twins reared together and found twins reared apart.
o Used MZ twins (100% genes, and had some both had the same environment and others
had different environments)
o Control for rearing environment by studying MZ twins reared together (MZT) vs. apart
(MZA)
MZT vs. MZA differences?
o Bouchard et al., 1990
Twins separated at birth knew one another on average for only 2 years after
birth, or 5 months before adopted so for the rest of their development into
adulthood they did not know one another
Results:
o No difference in height no significance difference, very high concordance between MZ
reared together and apart
The same can be said for; weight, intelligence and personality
The different environments that the twins were presumably reared in
doesnt matter
These types of data convince a lot of people that biology, genes and
nature are really important
We illicit the environment around us; based off of our genes. Our environments will be more
similar with someone we are 100% related to (in contrast to someone we are 50% related to)
generating similar effective psychological (rearing) environments
PSYCH 2AA3 Child Development Thursday, September 15, 2016

Might be the case that twins reared apart create for themselves effective psychological
environments; so that no matter what if separated they are treated the same; because perhaps
your genes are creating an environment for themselves. Thus, environment for the MZ twins
who are reared apart are eliciting the same environment similar treatment from others,
similar environments
Caveat your genes want you to be in an optimal environment but your environment itself is
not optimal the effects of the environment

Overall: really not sure the strength of both the environment and the genes in development

SUMMARY

Behavioural genetics methods attempt to tease apart nature vs nurture influences on

development
o Very complex, clever methodologies have been employed to help solve this but we are
still seconding guessing our data causing no concrete answer to be discovered (generally
said that the influence of both is even; 50/50).
Does the discovery of effective psychological rearing environments make environment
irrelevant?
Genes cannot explain everything
o Consider epigenetics
o MZ twins separated; one twin may optimize their genes perfect health
While another twin may not may have a different environment i.e.: taking a
job that exposes her to different pathogens that it influences her health
negatively more then the other twin