Clinical Brown Bag

Katherine Foster, Clinical Psychology Doctoral Student

Thursday, December 06, 2012, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
3021  East Hall

Event Information

Abstract:

Externalizing disorders--antisocial behavior and substance dependence disorders--are highly comorbid and pose substantial and protracted threats to social welfare. Understanding how these disorders are transmitted within families is critical for determining etiology and helping to develop viable intervention strategies to reduce the human and financial costs associated with these problems. Prior twin studies have shown that a highly heritable, general factor underlies familial transmission of externalizing disorders. The adoption design, however, provides a much stronger test of environmental influences on familial transmission. The current study applied the adoption design to better estimate the role of environmental influences on the association between parent externalizing disorders and their adoptive and biological offspring. Families (n=1590) with two parents and only biological, only adopted, and a mixture of biological and adopted children in late adolescence were assessed for symptoms of conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder, along with alcohol, nicotine and illicit drug use disorders. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the transmission of externalizing disorders as a function of the biological relationship between parents and children. Biological, but not adoptive, familial relationships predicted parent and child concordance of symptoms, suggesting that a general aggregate of primarily genetic risk underlies the familial transmission of externalizing disorders. Future work should target this general genetic vulnerability when investigating etiology and designing interventions for externalizing disorders.