Briley, D. A., Livengood, J., & Derringer, J. (2018). Behaviour genetic frameworks of causal reasoning for personality psychology. European Journal of Personality, 32(3), 202-220. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2153

  • This piece gives an overview of methods of applying genetically informative data to causal reasoning. Although it’s about “personality,” that’s really only because it was written for a personality journal; you could swap the phenotypes and environments illustrated in Figures 1-3 and all the same reasoning would apply. The one element that is relatively specific to personality is the discussion of dominance (non-additive) genetic effects, which are not observed nearly as often for non-personality phenotypes.

Karlsson Linnér, R., Mallard, T. T., Barr, P. B., Sanchez-Roige, S., Madole, J. W., Driver, M. N., … & Dick, D. M. (2021). Multivariate analysis of 1.5 million people identifies genetic associations with traits related to self-regulation and addiction. Nature Neuroscience, 24(10), 1367-1376. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00908-3

Treur, J. L., Munafò, M. R., Logtenberg, E., Wiers, R. W., & Verweij, K. J. (2021). Using Mendelian randomization analysis to better understand the relationship between mental health and substance use: a systematic review. Psychological Medicine, 51(10), 1593-1624. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003329172100180X

Burt, S. A., Clark, D. A., Gershoff, E. T., Klump, K. L., & Hyde, L. W. (2021). Twin differences in harsh parenting predict youth’s antisocial behavior. Psychological science, 32(3), 395-409. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620968532

Next: 11.4 Activity: Evaluate a Causal Claim

Previous: 11.2. Aggression

Home: Table of Contents