Abstract
A recent meta-analysis of 103 studies Burt (Clinical Psychology Review, 29:163–178, 2009a) highlighted the presence of etiological distinctions between aggressive (AGG) and non-aggressive rule-breaking (RB) dimensions of antisocial behavior, such that AGG was more heritable than was RB, whereas RB was more influenced by the shared environment. Unfortunately, behavioral genetic research on antisocial behavior to date (and thus, the research upon which the meta-analysis was based) has relied almost exclusively on the classical twin model. This reliance is problematic, as the strict assumptions that undergird this model (e.g., shared environmental and dominant genetic influences are not present simultaneously; there is no assortative mating) can have significant consequences on heritability estimates when they are violated. The nuclear twin family model, by contrast, allows researchers to relax and statistically evaluate many of the assumptions of the classical twin design by incorporating parental self-report data along with the more standard twin data. The goal of the current study was thus to evaluate whether prior findings of etiological distinctions between AGG and RB persisted when using the nuclear twin family model. We examined a sample of 312 child twin families from the Michigan State University Twin Registry. Results strongly supported prior findings of etiological distinctions between AGG and RB, such that broad genetic influences were observed to be particularly important to AGG whereas shared environmental influences contributed only to RB. Nevertheless, the current findings also implied that additive genetic influences on antisocial behavior may be overestimated when using the classical twin design.
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Notes
Crucial to twin methodology is the Equal Environments Assumption (EEA), which assumes that MZ twin pairs are no more likely to share the environmental factors that are etiologically relevant to the phenotype under study than are DZ twin pairs. Under this assumption, any differences in MZ and DZ correlations are due to differences in their genetic similarity. The EEA has been repeatedly tested and found to be valid for numerous phenotypes, including antisocial behavior (as reviewed in Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & McGruffin, 2008). As such, the EEA is not a focus of the current study.
The full ADSE model was chosen as our full model comparison because 1) neither the ASFE model nor the ADFE model provided a better fit to the data; and 2) the best-fitting models for AGG and RB were the ADE and ASE models, respectively. The ADSE model could thus serve as a basis of comparison across the two phenotypes. This decision was bolstered by the fact that F was estimated to be near zero for both AGG and RB (1 % of the variance or less) and was non-significant. In keeping with this very small estimate of F, there was also little evidence of covariance between A and F. Such findings imply that passive rGE has little, if any, influence on the presence of aggressive or non-aggressive antisocial behaviors during childhood.
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Acknowledgments
This project was supported by R01-MH081813 from the National Institute of Mental Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Mental Health or the National Institutes of Health. The authors thank all participating twins and their families for making this work possible.
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Burt, S.A., Klump, K.L. Etiological Distinctions between Aggressive and Non-aggressive Antisocial Behavior: Results from a Nuclear Twin Family Model. J Abnorm Child Psychol 40, 1059–1071 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-012-9632-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-012-9632-9