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

Noam Markovitch; Robert M. Kirkpatrick; Ariel Knafo-Noam

doi:10.1007/s10519-021-10075-7

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

Noam Markovitch^*, Robert M. Kirkpatrick, Ariel Knafo-Noam

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Scopus citations

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.

Original language	American English
Pages (from-to)	492-511
Number of pages	20
Journal	Behavior Genetics
Volume	51
Issue number	5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-021-10075-7
State	Published - Sep 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
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).

Funding Information:
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.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Keywords

Adolescence
Differential susceptibility
Domain-specificity
Externalizing behavior
Gene-environment interaction
Twins

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10.1007/s10519-021-10075-7

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title = "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",

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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note = "Funding Information: 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). Funding Information: 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. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.",

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Markovitch, N, Kirkpatrick, RM & Knafo-Noam, A 2021, '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', Behavior Genetics, vol. 51, no. 5, pp. 492-511. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-021-10075-7

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. / Markovitch, Noam; Kirkpatrick, Robert M.; Knafo-Noam, Ariel.
In: Behavior Genetics, Vol. 51, No. 5, 09.2021, p. 492-511.

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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