Nonshared Environment and Monozygotic Adolescent Twin Differences in Effortful Control

Abstract

Effortful control is the regulative dimension of temperament, and plays an important role in the etiology of internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescents. Temperamental traits are thought to be constitutional, but could also be modified by experience. If maternal parenting is an environmental experience for adolescents' regulative temperamental trait, it should account for effortful control differences between siblings growing up in the same family even after the genetic effect on adolescents' effortful control is taken into account. This hypothesis was tested in 585 pairs of Chinese monozygotic (MZ) twins. Results SOCIAL

Associations Between Parenting Styles and Perceived Child Effortful Control Within Chinese Families in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan

“…In the Confucian Taiwanese society, by contrast, children’s self-regulation is highly encouraged throughout society, so Taiwanese parents would use Chinese parenting strategies regardless of how they perceived their children’s EC, and children’s EC would be jointly reinforced by parents, families, schools, and society at large ( Phelps, 2005 ). The association between perceived child EC and autonomy granting (a subdimension of authoritative parenting) in the Taiwanese group was largely consistent with findings obtained previously (e.g., Eisenberg, Zhou, et al, 2005 ; Guo et al, 2011 ). Perhaps Taiwanese mothers, rooted in Confucian values, viewed the children’s high EC as a sign of developed maturity and so encouraged more autonomy in their children.…”

“…In addition to child adjustment, EC has also been associated with parenting. For instance, authoritarian, coercive, and punitive parenting, as well as negative parental expressivity and rejection, have been associated with lower levels of EC (e.g., Colman, Hardy, Albert, Raffaelli, & Crockett, 2006 ; Karreman, van Tuijl, van Aken, & Dekovic, 2008 ; Kochanska, Aksan, Prisco, & Adams, 2008 ; Zhou et al, 2004 ), whereas parenting strategies such as parental support, expression of positive emotion, and the setting of clear, consistent limits have been linked to higher self-regulation/EC (e.g., Eisenberg, Zhou, et al, 2005 ; Guo et al, 2011 ; Karreman et al, 2008 ). Moreover, the interaction between parents and children is a dynamic and reciprocal process that influences both parents and children (e.g., Bell, 1979 ; Loulis & Kuczynski, 1997 ).…”

A Longitudinal Investigation of the Associations Among Parenting, Deviant Peer Affiliation, and Externalizing Behaviors: A Monozygotic Twin Differences Design

“…Using a 5-point scale ranging from 1 ( never ) to 5 ( always ), participants rated items intended to measure two dimensions of their mothers’ and fathers’ parenting: warmth and hostility. These measures of parental warmth and hostility have been used in previous studies conducted in the United States (Ge et al, 1996; Kim et al, 2003) and have been validated in a Chinese adolescent sample (Guo et al, 2011). Parental warmth (seven items, with Cronbach's alpha ranging from 0.85 to 0.91 for mothers’, fathers’, and adolescents’ reports) measured the frequency with which parents expressed warmth and support toward their children.…”

The Heritability of Self-Control: a Meta-Analysis

“…The 31 twin studies provided 108 MZ twin correlations and 104 DZ correlations (two studies only included MZ twins; Beaver, 2008;Guo et al, 2011). The MZ twin correlations ranged between .18 (Wright et al, 2008) and .94 .…”