Abstract
Externalizing behavior is substantially affected by genetic effects, which are moderated by environmental exposures. However, little is known about whether these moderation effects differ depending on individual characteristics, and whether moderation of environmental effects generalizes across different environmental domains. With a large sample (N = 1,441 individuals) of early adolescent twins (ages 11 and 13), using a longitudinal multi-informant design, we tested interaction effects between negative emotionality and both positive and negative aspects of three key social domains: parents, peers, and schools, on the phenotypic variance as well as the etiology of externalizing. Negative emotionality moderated some of the environmental effects on the phenotypic, genetic, and environmental variance in externalizing, with adolescents at both ends of the negative emotionality distribution showing different patterns of sensitivity to the tested environmental influences. This is the first use of gene-environment interaction twin models to test individual differences in environmental sensitivity, offering a new approach to study such effects.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Lior Abramson, Dana Katsoty, Rotem Schapira and the research assistants who helped with data collection, and members of the Social Development Lab at the Hebrew University who commented on a previous version of the manuscript. The authors also thank the families in the Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins (LIST) for their continued participation.
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This work was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (grant # 1670/13 and grant # 1333/18). The first author was supported by a fellowship from the Israeli Committee for Advancing Psychometrics & the National Institute for Testing and Evaluation (ICAP & NITE).
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Conceptualization: NM, AKN; Methodology: AKN, NM; Formal analysis and investigation: NM, RMK; Writing—original draft preparation: NM; Writing—review and editing: NM, AKN, RMK; Funding acquisition: AKN; Supervision: AKN. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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Markovitch, N., Kirkpatrick, R.M. & Knafo-Noam, A. Are Different Individuals Sensitive to Different Environments? Individual Differences in Sensitivity to the Effects of the Parent, Peer and School Environment on Externalizing Behavior and its Genetic and Environmental Etiology . Behav Genet 51, 492–511 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-021-10075-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-021-10075-7