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The power of twin designs arises from the fact that twins may be either identical (monozygotic (MZ), i.e. developing from a single fertilized egg and therefore sharing all of their polymorphic alleles) or fraternal (dizygotic (DZ), i.e. developing from two fertilized eggs and therefore sharing on average 50% of their alleles, the same level of genetic similarity found in non-twin siblings).
There is evidence of heritability in personality traits. For example, one study found that approximately half of personality differences in high-school aged fraternal and identical twins were due to genetic variation - and another study suggests that no one personality trait is more heritable than another. [6] [8]
Twins were born between 1972 and 2000. [1] All twins born in Minnesota at that time were eligible to participate using birth registry data. Both identical and fraternal twins share certain aspects of their environment. This allows researchers to estimate the relative impact of environmental and genetic influences on phenotypes. The focus of the ...
[5] She also focused on the differences between twins and non-twins, and between identical and fraternal twins. [6] In a large study of five- and six-year-old children, she found that identical twins were similar to fraternal twins and matched pairs of non-twin siblings in almost all of the measured variables. [7]
In this case the adoption disentangles the genetic relatedness of the twins (either 50% or 100%) from their family environments. Likewise the classic twin study contrasts the differences between identical and fraternal twins within a family compared to differences observed between families. This core design can be extended: the so-called ...
A second and more common design is the twin study in which the similarity of identical and fraternal twins is used to estimate heritability. These studies can be limited by the fact that identical twins are not completely genetically identical, potentially resulting in an underestimation of heritability.
Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. (born October 3, 1937) is an American psychologist known for his behavioral genetics studies of twins raised apart. He is professor emeritus of psychology and director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota.
Before the advancement of molecular genetics, twin studies were almost the only mode of investigation of genetic influences on personality. Heritability was estimated as twice the difference between the correlation for identical, or monozygotic, twins and that for fraternal, or dizygotic, twins. Early studies indicated that personality was ...