Contemporary Behavioural Quantitative Genetics
Currently, the largest branch of human behavioural genetics is psychiatric genetics which studies phenotypes such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism.
Recent trends in behaviour genetics have indicated an additional focus toward researching the inheritance of human characteristics typically studied in developmental psychology. For instance, a major focus in developmental psychology has been to characterize the influence of parenting styles on children. However, in most studies, genes are a confounding variable. Because children share half of their alleles with each parent, any observed effects of parenting styles could be effects of having many of the same alleles as a parent (e.g. harsh aggressive parenting styles have been found to correlate with similar aggressive child characteristics: is it the parenting or the genes?). Thus, behaviour genetics research is currently undertaking to distinguish the effects of the family environment from the effects of genes. This branch of behaviour genetics research is becoming more closely associated with mainstream developmental psychology and the sub-field of developmental psychopathology as it shifts its focus to the heritability of such factors as emotional self-control, attachment, social functioning, aggressiveness, etc.
Several academic bodies exist to support behaviour genetic research, including the International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society, Behavior Genetics Association, the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics, and the International Society for Twin Studies. Behaviour genetic work features prominently in several more general societies, for instance the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society.
Read more about this topic: Quantitative Human Behavioural Genetics
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