The present study examined the extent to which motivation contributes to the prediction of school achievement among elementary school children beyond general mental ability (
g). The sample consisted ...of
N
=
1678 nine-year-old UK elementary school children who took part in the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS). Teachers provided achievement assessments according to the UK National Curriculum criteria for Mathematics, English, and Science, and pupils reported their ability self-perceptions and intrinsic values for these subjects. For all three domains,
g proved to be the strongest, and, in the case of Science, the only predictor of school achievement. However, in Mathematics and English, children's ability self-perceptions as well as intrinsic values each contributed incrementally to the prediction of achievement beyond
g, with ability self-perceptions being a better predictor than intrinsic values. Finally, commonality analyses revealed a substantial portion of common variance in school achievement explained both by
g and motivation. In the light of these results it is argued that the study of motivation offers valuable clues for the understanding and improvement of school achievement.
Disorders on the autism spectrum, as well as autistic traits in the general population, have been found to be both highly stable across age and highly heritable at individual ages. However, little is ...known about the overlap in genetic and environmental influences on autistic traits across age and the contribution of such influences to trait stability itself. The present study investigated these questions in a general population sample of twins.
More than 6,000 twin pairs were rated on an established scale of autistic traits by their parents at 8, 9, and 12 years of age and by their teachers at 9 and 12 years of age. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.
The results indicated that, consistently across raters, not only were autistic traits stable, and moderately to highly heritable at individual ages, but there was also a high degree of overlap in genetic influences across age. Furthermore, autistic trait stability could largely be accounted for by genetic factors, with the environment unique to each twin playing a minor role. The environment shared by twins had virtually no effect on the longitudinal stability in autistic traits.
Autistic traits are highly stable across middle childhood. and this stability is caused primarily by genetic factors.
Psychosis has been hypothesised to be a continuously distributed quantitative phenotype and disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder represent its extreme manifestations. Evidence ...suggests that common genetic variants play an important role in liability to both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Here we tested the hypothesis that these common variants would also influence psychotic experiences measured dimensionally in adolescents in the general population. Our aim was to test whether schizophrenia and bipolar disorder polygenic risk scores (PRS), as well as specific single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) previously identified as risk variants for schizophrenia, were associated with adolescent dimension-specific psychotic experiences. Self-reported Paranoia, Hallucinations, Cognitive Disorganisation, Grandiosity, Anhedonia, and Parent-rated Negative Symptoms, as measured by the Specific Psychotic Experiences Questionnaire (SPEQ), were assessed in a community sample of 2,152 16-year-olds. Polygenic risk scores were calculated using estimates of the log of odds ratios from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium GWAS stage-1 mega-analysis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The polygenic risk analyses yielded no significant associations between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder PRS and the SPEQ measures. The analyses on the 28 individual SNPs previously associated with schizophrenia found that two SNPs in TCF4 returned a significant association with the SPEQ Paranoia dimension, rs17512836 (p-value = 2.57×10⁻⁴) and rs9960767 (p-value = 6.23×10⁻⁴). Replication in an independent sample of 16-year-olds (N = 3,427) assessed using the Psychotic-Like Symptoms Questionnaire (PLIKS-Q), a composite measure of multiple positive psychotic experiences, failed to yield significant results. Future research with PRS derived from larger samples, as well as larger adolescent validation samples, would improve the predictive power to test these hypotheses further. The challenges of relating adult clinical diagnostic constructs such as schizophrenia to adolescent psychotic experiences at a genetic level are discussed.
Abstract Reading problems often co-occur with ADHD and conduct disorder. However, the patterns of co-occurrence and familial overlap between reading problems and other psychiatric disorders have not ...been systematically explored. We conducted a register-based cohort study including 8719 individuals with reading problems and their siblings, along with matched comparison individuals. Conditional logistic regressions estimated risks for ADHD, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, substance use disorder, and violent/non-violent criminality in individuals with reading problems and their siblings. Diagnoses of psychiatric disorders were physician-assigned and ascertained from the Swedish National Patient Register, and crime convictions from the Swedish National Crime Register. We found that individuals with reading problems had excess risks for all psychiatric disorders (except anorexia nervosa) and criminality, with risk ratios between 1.34 and 4.91. Siblings of individuals with reading problems showed excess risks for ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, substance use disorder, and non-violent criminality, with risk ratios between 1.14 and 1.70. In summary, individuals with reading problems had increased risks of virtually all psychiatric disorders, and criminality. The origin of most of these overlaps was familial, in that siblings of individuals with reading problems also had elevated risks of ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, substance use disorder, and non-violent criminality. These findings have implications for gene-searching efforts, and suggest that health care practitioners should be alert for signs of psychiatric disorders in families where reading problems exist.
Aggressive behavior in school is an ongoing concern. The current focus is on specific manifestations such as bullying, but the behavior is broad and heterogenous. Children spend a substantial amount ...of time in school, but their behaviors in the school setting tend to be less well characterized than at home. Because aggression may index multiple behavioral problems, we used three validated instruments to assess means, correlations and gender differences of teacher-rated aggressive behavior with co-occurring externalizing/internalizing problems and social behavior in 39,936 schoolchildren aged 7-14 from 4 population-based cohorts from Finland, the Netherlands, and the UK. Correlations of aggressive behavior were high with all other externalizing problems (r: 0.47-0.80) and lower with internalizing problems (r: 0.02-0.39). A negative association was observed with prosocial behavior (r: -0.33 to -0.54). Mean levels of aggressive behavior differed significantly by gender. Despite the higher mean levels of aggressive behavior in boys, the correlations were notably similar for boys and girls (e.g., aggressive-hyperactivity correlations: 0.51-0.75 boys, 0.47-0.70 girls) and did not vary greatly with respect to age, instrument or cohort. Thus, teacher-rated aggressive behavior rarely occurs in isolation; boys and girls with problems of aggressive behavior likely require help with other behavioral and emotional problems. Important to note, higher aggressive behavior is not only associated with higher amounts of other externalizing and internalizing problems but also with lower levels of prosocial behavior.
The development of conduct problems in childhood and adolescence is associated with adverse long-term outcomes, including psychiatric morbidity. Although genes constitute a proven factor of stability ...in conduct problems, less is known regarding their role in conduct problems' developmental course (i.e. systematic age changes, for instance linear increases or decreases).Mothers rated conduct problems from age 4 to 16 years in 10,038 twin pairs from the Twins Early Development Study. Individual differences in the baseline level (.78; 95% CI: .68-.88) and the developmental course of conduct problems (.73; 95% CI: .60-.86) were under high and largely independent additive genetic influences. Shared environment made a small contribution to the baseline level but not to the developmental course of conduct problems. These results show that genetic influences not only contribute to behavioural stability but also explain systematic change in conduct problems. Different sets of genes may be associated with the developmental course versus the baseline level of conduct problems. The structure of genetic and environmental influences on the development of conduct problems suggests that repeated preventive interventions at different developmental stages might be necessary to achieve a long-term impact.
The synthesis of quantitative genetics and molecular genetics is transforming research in the behavioural sciences. The ability to measure inherited DNA differences directly has led to polygenic ...scores and to new methods to estimate heritability and genetic correlations. This issue provides examples of how these advances can be appllied to research on gene‐environment interplay in developmental psychopathology.
Abstract Background In the excitement about genomics, it is easy to lose sight of one of the most important findings from behavioural genetics: At least half of the variance of psychopathology is ...caused by environmental effects that are not shared by children growing up in the same family, which includes error of measurement. However, a 30‐year search for the systematic causes of nonshared environment in a line‐up of the usual suspects, especially parenting, has not identified the culprits. Method I briefly review this research, but primarily consider the conceptual framework of the search for ‘missing’ nonshared environmental effects. Results The search has focused on exogenous events like parenting, but nonshared environment might not be caused by anything we would call an event. Instead, it might reflect endogenous processes such as noisy biological systems (such as somatic mutations and epigenetics) or, at a psychological level, idiosyncratic subjective perceptions of past and present experiences, which could be called nonshared environmental experience to distinguish it from exogenous events. Although real, nonshared environment might be random in the philosophy of science sense of being unpredictable, even though it can have stable effects that predict subsequent behaviour. Conclusion I wade into the weeds of randomness and suggest that this so‐called ‘gloomy prospect’ might not be so gloomy.
Network models have become a popular alternative to factor models for analysing the phenotypic relationships among cognitive abilities. Studies have begun to compare these models directly to one ...another using cognitive ability data, although such a comparison has so far not extended to genetics. Our aim with this study was therefore to compare factor and network models of cognitive abilities first at a phenotypic level and then at a genetic level. We analyzed data from the Twins Early Development Study that were collected using 14 cognitive ability measures from 11,290 twins in the UK aged 12 years old. We conducted phenotypic and genetic analyses in which numerous factor and network models were tested, including a novel network twin model. Factor and network models both provided useful representations of the phenotypic and genetic relationships among cognitive abilities. Surprisingly, several relationships among cognitive abilities within the genetic networks were negative, which suggests that these cognitive abilities might share some genetic variants with inverse effects, although more research is currently needed to confirm this. Implications for future genomic research are discussed.
•Factor and network models are common methods for analysing cognitive abilities.•These models represent the genetic relationships among cognitive abilities well.•Within genetic networks, some cognitive abilities are negatively genetically related.•This suggests that some cognitive abilities share inverse genetic effects.•Genomic research might benefit from the adoption of a network perspective.
The American Psychological Association Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions are presented to persons who, in the opinion of the Committee on Scientific Awards, have made distinguished ...theoretical or empirical contributions to basic research in psychology. Robert Plomin is a recipient of the 2017 award "for leading the transformation of behavioral genetics from an isolated and sometimes vilified scientific outpost to a fully integrated mainstay of scientific psychology." Plomin's award citation, biography, and a selected bibliography are presented here. (PsycINFO Database Record
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