On the etiology of aesthetic chills: a behavioral genetic study

Aesthetic chills, broadly defined as a somatic marker of peak emotional-hedonic responses, are experienced by individuals across a variety of human cultures. Yet individuals vary widely in the propensity of feeling them. These individual differences have been studied in relation to demographics, personality, and neurobiological and physiological factors, but no study to date has explored the genetic etiological sources of variation. To partition genetic and environmental sources of variation in the propensity of feeling aesthetic chills, we fitted a biometrical genetic model to data from 14,127 twins (from 8995 pairs), collected by the Netherlands Twin Register. Both genetic and unique environmental factors accounted for variance in aesthetic chills, with heritability estimated at 0.36 ([0.33, 0.39] 95% CI). We found females more prone than males to report feeling aesthetic chills. However, a test for genotype x sex interaction did not show evidence that heritability differs between sexes. We thus show that the propensity of feeling aesthetic chills is not shaped by nurture alone, but it also reflects underlying genetic propensities

Three methods that advance tests of complex psychological theory using structural equation models.

Theories of psychological constructs like personality, pathology, or cognition, give rise to models that implicitly or explicitly impose a causal structure on mental processes. As there are rarely feasible ways to experimentally isolate and/or individually manipulate psychological variables, evaluating these causal structures is challenging. Competing causal theories, like latent variable and network theories, of psychological constructs are often evaluated based on correlational data, which rarely provide satisfactory conclusions on their relative merits. We discuss three methods that can improve our collective ability to distinguish between models derived from competing theories of psychological constructs. These methods significantly expand the set of models that are empirically identified in structural equation models (SEM) by respectively implementing penalized instrumental variable regression, modeled heteroskedasticity and modeled non-normality. To ease their application in psychological sciences we reformulate all three methods into SEMs. Once formulated as a SEMs, the core identification strategies can readily be adapted to the context of models applied widely in psychological science like growth-, (intense) longitudinal-, multivariate- or measurement-models

Genetic and environmental associations between self-control and educational achievement in 7 year old children.

Within this project we decompose the association between self-control and educational achievement into genetic and environmental correlation

On the etiology of aesthetic chills: a behavioral genetic study

Aesthetic chills, broadly defined as a somatic marker of peak emotional-hedonic responses, are experienced by individuals across a variety of human cultures. Yet individuals vary widely in the propensity of feeling them. These individual differences have been studied in relation to demographics, personality, and neurobiological and physiological factors, but no study to date has explored the genetic etiological sources of variation. To partition genetic and environmental sources of variation in the propensity of feeling aesthetic chills, we fitted a biometrical genetic model to data from 14,127 twins (from 8995 pairs), collected by the Netherlands Twin Register. Both genetic and unique environmental factors accounted for variance in aesthetic chills, with heritability estimated at 0.36 ([0.33, 0.39] 95% CI). We found females more prone than males to report feeling aesthetic chills. However, a test for genotype x sex interaction did not show evidence that heritability differs between sexes. We thus show that the propensity of feeling aesthetic chills is not shaped by nurture alone, but it also reflects underlying genetic propensities