Intergenerational stability and change in the causes of variation in personality

Young, P.A.; Eaves, Lindon J.; Eysenck, H. J.

doi:10.1016/0191-8869(80)90004-5

Cited by 56 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…In a Hawaiian study, the tendency to lie showed the strongest family similarity out of 54 personality traits (Ahern et al, 1982). This genetic influence is supported by a British twin study, which showed that lie scores were more similar for monozygotic twins than for dizygotic twins, heritability being estimated at 48% (Young et al, 1980). A study of twins and family members similarly estimated broad heritability at 29% to 42% (Eaves et al, 1999).…”

Section: Universal Rule Adherencesupporting

confidence: 54%

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe

Fröst¹

2017

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North and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, social relations have long conformed to the Western European Marriage Pattern, i.e., men and women marry relatively late; many people never marry; children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households, and households often have non-kin members. This pattern goes back at least to the thirteenth century and perhaps to prehistoric times. I argue that this environment of weaker kinship caused northwest Europeans to create communities based on shared moral rules, rather than shared kinship. Community members enforced these rules by monitoring not only the behavior of other members but also their own behavior and even their own thoughts. Initially, this new mindset did not have a genetic basis. Individuals acquired it within the bounds of phenotypic plasticity. Over time, however, a genetic basis would have developed through the survival and reproduction of individuals who were better at being socially independent, at obeying universal rules, at monitoring other community members, and at self-monitoring, self-judging, and self-punishing. These psychological adaptations-independent social orientation, universal rule adherence, affective empathy, guilt proneness-are moderately to highly heritable. Although they are complex, they required only minor evolutionary changes to evolve out of mechanisms that were already present but limited to specific behavioral contexts. Affective empathy, for instance, is a species-wide trait but usually confined to relations with close kin, particularly between a mother and her young children. An evolutionary scenario is proposed, and two questions discussed. Are these mental traits too complex to have evolved over a span of 30 to 300 generations? Are they too altruistic to be sustainable?

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Section: Universal Rule Adherencesupporting

confidence: 54%

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe

Fröst¹

2017

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“…There are no expectations for the form or direction of age or generation effects and their detection will rest upon the failure of the basic model, unless there are gross differences in the phenotypic distributions between generations as revealed by differences in, for example, variances or skewness. Young, Eaves and Eysenck (1980) have demonstrated one approach to the investigation of intergenerational instability and have shown marked differences in gene action between adults and juveniles for three of the four scales of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1975). The twin family design contains all the statistics used by Young et a!, (1980) and more, and thus provides a sound basis for the study of intergenerational stability in the way they described by specifying different parameters for the parental generation, the juvenile generation and intergenerational relationships.…”

Section: Examining the Assumptions Of The Basic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Young, Eaves and Eysenck (1980) have demonstrated one approach to the investigation of intergenerational instability and have shown marked differences in gene action between adults and juveniles for three of the four scales of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1975). The twin family design contains all the statistics used by Young et a!, (1980) and more, and thus provides a sound basis for the study of intergenerational stability in the way they described by specifying different parameters for the parental generation, the juvenile generation and intergenerational relationships. Although in theory the consistency of any model over generations may be tested using the method of Young et al (1980), in practice intergenerational instability limits the complexity of models which may be examined, as it greatly increases the ratio of parameters to unique statistics.…”

Section: Examining the Assumptions Of The Basic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The twin family design contains all the statistics used by Young et a!, (1980) and more, and thus provides a sound basis for the study of intergenerational stability in the way they described by specifying different parameters for the parental generation, the juvenile generation and intergenerational relationships. Although in theory the consistency of any model over generations may be tested using the method of Young et al (1980), in practice intergenerational instability limits the complexity of models which may be examined, as it greatly increases the ratio of parameters to unique statistics. Therefore, the basic model and its extensions should be examined with the knowledge that data from only a single generation may be available for their resolution.…”

Section: Examining the Assumptions Of The Basic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The advantages of analysing human variation using twins and twin half-sibs and cousins

Haley

Last

1981

Heredity

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SUMMARYThe 'twin family" design is a new strategy for studying quantitative characters in man which overcomes most limitations of earlier designs and which is readily accessible to existing twin research units as it uses only adult twins (both identical and non-identical) and their spouses and offspring and juvenile twins (both identical and non-identical) and their parents. The design yields all information inherent in ordinary twin studies but also permits the simultaneous estimation of more components than any other design. Tests for most genetical and environmental components of variation and the assumptions of the design are provided. Particular advantages are the unambiguous separation of sex-linkage and maternal inheritance, the analysis of the mechanism of assortative mating and the specification of more realistic environmental models. Although several components are confounded the biases are not seriously misleading. However, it would be necessary to include adoption data to resolve the effects of cultural transmission which are otherwise confounded with the family environment.Nevertheless, this design provides a wealth of data on a diversity of relationships and promises to be a valuable tool for the analysis of individual differences in man.

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“…These studies are powerful but difficult to conduct in the face of justifiable need to protect the privacy of adoptees and their families, and may require that the biases of placement and sampling be modeled in addition to those of genetic and nongenetic inheritance. A series of papers in the early 1980s recognized that the resolution of mechanisms of mate selection would be facilitated by the study of the spouses of related individuals such as twins (Eaves, 1980;Eaves & Heath, 1981) and/or siblings . Heath (1987) pointed out that the spouses of twins and siblings could also resolve the effects of mate selection on spousal resemblance from those on spousal interaction without recourse to longitudinal follow-up data on spouse pairs.…”

Section: Towards a General Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting the ‘Human’ Back in Genetics: Modeling the Extended Kinships of Twins

Eaves

2009

Twin Res Hum Genet

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Few papers have attempted to address the potential of extended kinships of twins to resolve the complexities of biological and cultural inheritance in humans. Since the mid-80s these issues have largely been buried beneath the quest for specific genes that contribute to individual differences in complex traits and liability to disease. The articles of Keller et al. and Medland and Keller (current issue) revisit these issues. History will decide whether these new papers represent the final gasp of a paradigm superceded by the ‘new’ genetics or contain the timely seeds of new birth in the face of a 30-year genetic research program otherwise poised on the cusp of degeneration (Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970).

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Intergenerational stability and change in the causes of variation in personality

Cited by 56 publications

References 19 publications

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe

The advantages of analysing human variation using twins and twin half-sibs and cousins

Putting the ‘Human’ Back in Genetics: Modeling the Extended Kinships of Twins

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