How nonshared environmental factors come to correlate with heredity

Abstract

Conventional longitudinal behavioral genetic models estimate the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to stability and change of traits and behaviors. Longitudinal models rarely explain the processes that generate observed differences between genetically and socially related individuals. We propose that exchanges between individuals and their environments (i.e., phenotype–environment effects) can explain the emergence of observed differences over time. Phenotype–environment models, however, would require violation of the independence assumption of standard behavioral genetic models; that is, uncorrelated genetic and environmental factors. We review how specification of phenotype–environment effects contributes to understanding observed changes in genetic variability over time and longitudinal correlations among nonshared environmental factors. We then provide an example using 30 days of positive and negative affect scores from an all-female sample of twins. Results demonstrate that the phenotype–environment effects explain how heritability estimates fluctuate as well as how nonshared environmental factors persist over time. We discuss possible mechanisms underlying change in gene–environment correlation over time, the advantages and challenges of including gene–environment correlation in longitudinal twin models, and recommendations for future research.