Tag

research methods

E for Early Life Trauma

By | A-Z

Objective Measures or Subjective Measures?  In this week’s blog, we take a look at the difference between objective and subjective measures in capturing the impact of early life trauma on mental health.           Psychological traumas are typically defined as experiences that cause actual or potential harm…

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P is for Polygenic Risk Scores

By | A-Z

Nearly all human traits, such as height, weight, and intelligence, and common disorders like major depressive and anxiety disorders are polygenic. This means that variation in more than one gene (usually many genes) contributes to total genetic predisposition for a specific trait or disorder. Chris outlines how Polygenic Risk Scores…

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M for Missing Heritability

By | A-Z

Decades of twin studies have yielded evidence of the heritability of many different traits. What we mean by this is the proportion of variation in a trait that can be explained by genetic differences between individuals. Research has moved towards identifying specific genetic variants associated with these traits through Genome-Wide…

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Measurement and the heritability gap for childhood behaviour problems

By | Research Matters

Decades of twin studies have shown that childhood behaviour problems including anxiety, depression, conduct and hyperactivity are substantially heritable. However, our recent research found that individual differences in behaviour problems are not significantly influenced by the common DNA differences that we directly measure. This finding held across diverse domains of…

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