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Environmental Contributions to the Stability of Antisocial Behavior over Time: Are They Shared or Non-shared?

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Abstract

It has recently been argued that shared environmental influences are moderate, identifiable, and persistent sources of individual differences in most forms of child and adolescent psychopathology, including antisocial behavior. Unfortunately, prior studies examining the stability of shared environmental influences over time were limited by possible passive gene-environment correlations, shared informants effects, and/or common experiences of trauma. The current study sought to address each of these limitations. We examined adolescent self-reported antisocial behavior in a 3.5 year longitudinal sample of 610 biological and adoptive sibling pairs from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS). Results revealed that 74–81% of shared environmental influences present at time 1 were also present at time 2, whereas most non-shared environmental influences (88–89%) were specific to a particular assessment period. Such results provide an important constructive replication of prior research, strongly suggesting that shared environmental contributions to antisocial behavior are systematic in nature.

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Notes

  1. To better examine whether our results were impacted by the different symptoms of ASPD assessed as part of CD and AAB, we re-ran our analyses restricting the data to those behaviors that were “common” across the CD and AAB assessments (i.e., CD: stolen without confrontation, lying, fighting, cruelty to others, fighting with a weapon, destroying property, and breaking and entering; AAB: illegal acts, irritability and aggression, impulsivity, and reckless disregard for safety; phenotypic r = .42). Results were notably consistent to those reported above. The non-shared environmental correlation (rE = .50) indicated that most non-shared environmental variance (75%) did not persist over time. By contrast, the shared environmental correlation was estimated to be 1.0 (95% CI = .65–1.0), suggesting that 100% of the shared environmental effects contributing to CD also contributed to AAB. Such results imply that, regardless of the operationalization of CD/AAB, shared environmental influences evidence more stability over time than do non-shared environmental influences.

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Acknowledgment

This research was funded by USPHS Grants # AA11886 and MH066140.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    S. Alexandra Burt

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Matt McGue & William G. Iacono

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  1. S. Alexandra Burt
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  2. Matt McGue
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  3. William G. Iacono
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Correspondence to S. Alexandra Burt.

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Burt, S.A., McGue, M. & Iacono, W.G. Environmental Contributions to the Stability of Antisocial Behavior over Time: Are They Shared or Non-shared?. J Abnorm Child Psychol 38, 327–337 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-009-9367-4

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