Achievement and Ascription in Educational Attainment: Genetic and Environmental Influences on Adolescent Schooling

Social Forces ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Environmental Influences

scholarly journals Sex Differences in Genetic and Environmental Influences on Educational Attainment and Income

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 516-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ragnhild E. Ørstavik ◽  
Nikolai Czajkowski ◽  
Espen Røysamb ◽  
Gun Peggy Knudsen ◽  
Kristian Tambs ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Sex Differences ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Educational Level ◽  
Environmental Influences ◽  
Phenotypic Correlation ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Genetic And Environmental Factors ◽  
The Relationship

In many Western countries, women now reach educational levels comparable to men, although their income remains considerably lower. For the past decades, it has become increasingly clear that these measures of socio-economic status are influenced by genetic as well as environmental factors. Less is known about the relationship between education and income, and sex differences. The aim of this study was to explore genetic and environmental factors influencing education and income in a large cohort of young Norwegian twins, with special emphasis on gender differences. National register data on educational level and income were obtained for 7,710 twins (aged 29–41 years). Bivariate Cholesky models were applied to estimate qualitative and quantitative gender differences in genetic and environmental influences, the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to the correlation between education and income, and genetic correlations within and between sexes and phenotypes. The phenotypic correlation between educational level and income was 0.34 (0.32–0.39) for men and 0.45 (0.43–0.48) for women. An ACE model with both qualitative and quantitative sex differences fitted the data best. The genetic correlation between men and women (rg) was 0.66 (0.22–1.00) for educational attainment and 0.38 (0.01–0.75) for income, and between the two phenotypes 0.31 (0.08–0.52) for men and 0.72 (0.64–0.85) for women. Our results imply that, in relatively egalitarian societies with state-supported access to higher education and political awareness of gender equality, genetic factors may play an important role in explaining sex differences in the relationship between education and income.

scholarly journals The winding roads to adulthood: a twin study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaili Rimfeld ◽  
Margherita Malancini ◽  
Amy E. Packer ◽  
Agnieszka Gidziela ◽  
Andrea G. Allegrini ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Emerging Adulthood ◽  
Transition To Adulthood ◽  
Environmental Influences ◽  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Average Correlation ◽  
Psychological Traits ◽  
Shared Genetic

AbstractIn the 21st century, emerging adulthood has stretched from the late teens through the twenties. Although this extended transition to adulthood can create stress, it can also offer opportunities to explore vocations and relationships that provide a better fit to individuals’ proclivities, including their genetic propensities.Here we report the results of the first systematic investigation of genetic and environmental influences on 57 psychological traits covering major issues in emerging adulthood such as aspirations, thoughts and attitudes, relationships and personality. We also investigate how these traits relate to physical and mental health, educational attainment and wellbeing using a sample of nearly 5000 pairs of UK twins aged 21-25 from the Twins Early Development Study.All 57 traits showed significant genetic influence, with an average heritability of 34% (SNP heritability ∼10%). Most of the variance (59% on average) was explained by non-shared environmental influences. These diverse traits were associated with mental health (average correlation .20), wellbeing (.16), physical health (.12) and educational attainment (.06). Shared genetic factors explained the majority of these correlations (∼50%). Together, these emerging adulthood traits explained on average 30% of the variance in the outcomes (range = 8 to 69%), suggesting that these traits relate to the outcomes additively.We conclude that the environmental uncertainties of emerging adulthood in the 21st century do not diminish the importance of genetics. As adolescents travel down long and winding roads to adulthood, their trip is substantially influenced by genetic proclivities that nudge them down different paths leading to different destinations.

scholarly journals Resource Compensation or Multiplication? The Interplay between Cognitive Ability and Social Origin in Explaining Educational Attainment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Stienstra ◽  
Ineke Maas ◽  
Antonie Knigge ◽  
Wiebke Schulz
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Educational Outcomes ◽  
Compensation Effect ◽  
Environmental Influences ◽  
Social Origin ◽  
Large Sample ◽  
Do So

Abstract While previous research has conclusively established that children with higher cognitive ability and those originating from advantaged socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds have better educational outcomes, the interplay between the influences of cognitive ability and social origin has been largely overlooked. The influence of cognitive ability might be weaker in high-SES families as a result of resource compensation, and stronger in high-SES families owing to resource multiplication. We investigate these mechanisms while taking into account the possibility that the association between cognitive ability and educational attainment might be partly spurious due to unobserved genetic and environmental influences. We do so by analysing a large sample of twins from the German TwinLife study (Npairs = 2,190). Our results show that the association between cognitive ability and educational attainment is to a large extent confounded by genetic and shared environmental factors. If this is not considered, and this is the case in most previous studies, high-SES parents seem to compensate for the lower cognitive ability of their children. However, when we consider the genetic and shared environmental confounding, the resource compensation effect becomes non-significant.

Behavioral Testing of Mice Concerning Anxiety and Depression

2015 ◽  
Vol 223 (3) ◽  
pp. 151-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Schweinfurth ◽  
Undine E. Lang
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Influences ◽  
Sickness Behavior ◽  
Laboratory Research ◽  
Anxiety And Depression ◽  
Housing Conditions ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Behavioral Testing ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Animal Trials ◽  
Resilience Factors

Abstract. In the development of new psychiatric drugs and the exploration of their efficacy, behavioral testing in mice has always shown to be an inevitable procedure. By studying the behavior of mice, diverse pathophysiological processes leading to depression, anxiety, and sickness behavior have been revealed. Moreover, laboratory research in animals increased at least the knowledge about the involvement of a multitude of genes in anxiety and depression. However, multiple new possibilities to study human behavior have been developed recently and improved and enable a direct acquisition of human epigenetic, imaging, and neurotransmission data on psychiatric pathologies. In human beings, the high influence of environmental and resilience factors gained scientific importance during the last years as the search for key genes in the development of affective and anxiety disorders has not been successful. However, environmental influences in human beings themselves might be better understood and controllable than in mice, where environmental influences might be as complex and subtle. The increasing possibilities in clinical research and the knowledge about the complexity of environmental influences and interferences in animal trials, which had been underestimated yet, question more and more to what extent findings from laboratory animal research translate to human conditions. However, new developments in behavioral testing of mice involve the animals’ welfare and show that housing conditions of laboratory mice can be markedly improved without affecting the standardization of results.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document