The winding roads to adulthood: A twin study.

Aims: 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.

Materials & Methods: We use a sample of nearly 5000 pairs of UK twins aged 21-25 from the Twins Early Development Study.

Breadth versus depth: Cumulative risk model and continuous measure prediction of poor language and reading outcomes at 12.

This study examines whether, and how, multiple risks in early childhood are associated with an increased likelihood of a poor language or literacy outcome in early adolescence. Using data from 210 participants in the longitudinal Twins Early Developmental Study, we focus on the following risk factors at age 4: family risk, and poor language, speech, emergent literacy and nonverbal skills. The outcomes of interest at age 12 are language, reading fluency and reading comprehension.

Predicting educational achievement from genomic measures and socioeconomic status.

The two best predictors of children's educational achievement available from birth are parents' socioeconomic status (SES) and, recently, children's inherited DNA differences that can be aggregated in genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS). Here, we chart for the first time the developmental interplay between these two predictors of educational achievement at ages 7, 11, 14 and 16 in a sample of almost 5,000 UK school children. We show that the prediction of educational achievement from both GPS and SES increases steadily throughout the school years.

Polygenic score for educational attainment captures DNA variants shared between personality traits and educational achievement.

Genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS) can be used to predict individual genetic risk and resilience. For example, a GPS for years of education () explains substantial variance in cognitive traits such as general cognitive ability and educational achievement. Personality traits are also known to contribute to individual differences in educational achievement.

The genetics of university success.

University success, which includes enrolment in and achievement at university, as well as quality of the university, have all been linked to later earnings, health and wellbeing. However, little is known about the causes and correlates of differences in university-level outcomes. Capitalizing on both quantitative and molecular genetic data, we perform the first genetically sensitive investigation of university success with a UK-representative sample of 3,000 genotyped individuals and 3,000 twin pairs.

Aggressive behaviour in childhood and adolescence: the role of smoking during pregnancy, evidence from four twin cohorts in the EU-ACTION consortium.

Background: Maternal smoking during pregnancy (MSDP) has been linked to offspring's externalizing problems. It has been argued that socio-demographic factors (e.g.

New literacy challenge for the twenty-first century: genetic knowledge is poor even among well educated.

We live in an age of rapidly advancing genetic research. This research is generating new knowledge that has implications for personal health and well-being. The present study assessed the level of genetic knowledge and personal engagement with genetics in a large sample (N = 5404) of participants.

Publication Trends Over 55 Years of Behavioral Genetic Research.

We document the growth in published papers on behavioral genetics for 5-year intervals from 1960 through 2014. We used 1861 papers published in Behavior Genetics to train our search strategy which, when applied to Ovid PsychINFO, selected more than 45,000 publications. Five trends stand out: (1) the number of behavioral genetic publications has grown enormously; nearly 20,000 papers were published in 2010-2014.