Aggression in children is highly predictive of problems later in life, including delinquency, interpersonal relationship difficulties, and depression, among other maladjustments (Brame, Nagin, & Tremblay, 2001; Provencal,... [ view full abstract ]
Aggression in children is highly predictive of problems later in life, including delinquency, interpersonal relationship difficulties, and depression, among other maladjustments (Brame, Nagin, & Tremblay, 2001; Provencal, Booij, & Tremblay, 2015). The ACTION Consortium is a collaboration of several large-scale, prospective longitudinal studies of childhood aggression and its comorbidities (Boomsma, 2015; Bartels et al., under review). As in most behavioral consortia, there is a moderate degree of measurement heterogeneity across studies in ACTION. To assess aggression in children, cohorts in ACTION used different questionnaires, collected data from different raters, and obtained scores for children at different ages. In this talk, we present a modeling strategy for creating a harmonized aggression phenotype score for school-aged children. Aggression was modeled across five cohorts from Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and the UK using mother and father reports for children aged 7 to 12 years. Creating a harmonized phenotype score with a multi-rater bi-factor model allowed for genetic structural equation models to be fitted to the combined data across the consortium. The increased sample size due to pooling across cohorts (42,468 twin pairs) permitted us to investigate complex models for twin data, including quantitative and qualitative sex-limitation models and sibling interaction effects. Results indicated that opposite sex twin pairs were better modeled as having unique path coefficients for shared and non-shared environmental components compared to their same-sex counterparts. Heritability estimates were generally higher for males (~62%) than females (~50%), and these estimates were slightly lower than initial estimates within two large individual cohorts (Bartels et al., under review). This difference could be due to a negative sibling interaction effect found in female same-sex pairs and opposite sex pairs.
References
Bartels, M., Hendriks, A. M., Mauri, M., Krapohl, E., Whipp, A., Bolhuis, K., … Boomsma, D. I. (Submitted). Childhood aggression and the co-occurrence of behavioral and emotional problems: Results across 3-16 years from multiple raters in 6 cohorts in the EU-ACTION project.
Boomsma, D. I. (2015). Aggression in children: unravelling the interplay of genes and environment through (epi)genetics and metabolomics. Journal of Pediatric and Neonatal Individualized Medicine, 4(2):e040251.
Brame, B., Nagin, D. S., and Tremblay, R. E. (2001). Developmental trajectories of physical aggression from school entry to late adolescence. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(4):503-512.
Provencal, N., Booij, L., and Tremblay, R. (2015). The developmental origins of chronic physical aggression: biological pathways triggered by early life adversity. Journal of Experimental Biology, 218(1): 123-133.
Psychopathology (e.g., Internalizing, Externalizing, Psychosis) , Statistical Methods
