Adolescent personality moderates genetic and environmental influences on relationships with parents

Abstract

In contrast with early theories of socialization that emphasized the role of parents in shaping their children's personalities, recent empirical evidence suggests an evocative relationship between adolescent personality traits and the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship. Research using behavior genetic methods suggests that the association between personality and parenting is genetically mediated, such that the genetic effects on adolescent personality traits overlap with the genetic effects on parenting behavior. In the current study, the authors examined whether the etiology of this relationship might change depending on the adolescent's personality. Biometrical moderation models were used to test for gene- environment interaction and correlation between personality traits and measures of conflict, regard, and involvement with parents in a sample of 2,452 adolescents (M age = 17.79 years). They found significant moderation of both positive and negative qualities of the parent-adolescent relationship, such that the genetic and environmental variance in relationship quality varied as functions of the adolescent's levels of personality. These findings support the importance of adolescent personality in the development of the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship.

Figure 1

Path diagram of a biometrical moderation model with adolescent personality (PERSONALITY) moderating the genetic and environmental influences on parent-adolescent relationship (PARENTING). The model is a variation of the bivariate (Cholesky) decomposition model, in which the variances and covariances of the observed variables are decomposed into the proportion of variance associated with genetic (a²), shared environmental (c²) and nonshared environmental (e²) components that are shared between the phenotypes and unique to one of. There are two sets of paths contributing genetic and environmental influences: those common to parent-adolescent relationship and the moderator (personality), and those unique to parent relationship. The paths from the moderator (M) variable to the dependent variable are now linear functions of the form a + βM, where a is the parameter for genetic influence on the variable, β is a regression coefficient, and M is the level of the moderator variable.

Figure 2

Panel 1: No-Moderation Model of Regard and Positive Emotionality. Panel 2: Moderation Model of Regard as a function of Positive Emotionality. A=genetic variance, C=shared environmental variance, E=nonshared environmental variance.

Figure 3

Variance in Conflict as a function of Positive Emotionality. A=genetic variance, C=shared environmental variance, E=nonshared environmental variance.

Figure 4

Variance in Regard as a function of Negative Emotionality. A=genetic variance, C=shared environmental variance, E=nonshared environmental variance.

Figure 5

Variance in Involvement as a function of Negative Emotionality. A=genetic variance, C=shared environmental variance, E=nonshared environmental variance.

Figure 6

Variance in Regard as a function of Constraint. A=genetic variance, C=shared environmental variance, E=nonshared environmental variance.