Behavioral Genetics

Abstract

Some children seemingly effortlessly enter into supportive peer relationships, are healthily attached to their parents, and appear to be sensitive to the thoughts and needs of others. Of course, others do not display such behaviors, and the extent to which children develop socially can heavily impact all aspects of their lives. It is therefore important to understand risk and resilience factors infl uencing social development. Behavioral genetics is one area of research that can inform this issue (see Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & McGuffi n, 2008 ). Amongst other things, this type of research can provide estimates of the extent to which individual differences with regard to a behavior are heritable, help to specify genetic and environmental infl uences on social behaviors, and explain the interactions between these infl uences. This chapter will begin with a discussion of the basic techniques commonly used by behavioral geneticists in order to understand genetic and environmental infl uences on behavior. Next, some empirical data from genetic studies shall be presented. As social development is such a broad construct, three key aspects of social behavior will be focused on: antisocial behavior, bullying, and prosocial behavior. Behavioral Genetic TechniquesPhenotypic v ariance One of the primary goals of behavior genetics is to partition the variance of a given trait or phenotype ( V P ) into its constituent components, namely, genetic variance ( V Gen ) and