Shared Environment Effects on Children's Emotion Recognition

The genetic and environmental origins of emotional and cognitive empathy: Review and meta-analyses of twin studies

Empathy is considered a cornerstone of human social experience, and as such has been widely investigated from psychological and neuroscientific approaches. To better understand the factors influencing individual differences in empathy, we reviewed and meta-analyzed the behavioral genetic literature of emotional empathy- sharing others' emotions (k=13), and cognitive empathy- understanding others' emotions (k = 15), as manifested in twin studies. Results showed that emotional empathy is more heritable, 48.3 % [41.3 %-50.6 %], than cognitive empathy, 26.9 % [18.1 %-35.8 %]. Moreover, cognitive empathy as examined by performance tests was affected by the environment shared by family members, 11.9 % [2.6 %-21.0 %], suggesting that emotional understanding is influenced, to some degree, by environmental factors that have similar effects on family members beyond their genetic relatedness. The effects of participants' age and the method used to asses empathy on the etiology of empathy were also examined. These findings have implications for understanding how individual differences in empathy are formed. After discussing these implications, we suggest theoretical and methodological future research directions that could potentially elucidate the relations between genes, brain, and empathy.

The Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins (LIST) Reaches Adolescence: Genetic and Environmental Pathways to Social, Personality and Moral Development

The Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins (LIST) focuses on the developmental, genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in children's and adolescents' social behavior. Key variables have been empathy, prosocial behavior, temperament and values. Another major goal of LIST has been to study gene-environment correlations, mainly concerning parenting. LIST includes 1657 families of Hebrew-speaking Israeli twins who have participated at least once in the study. Children's environment and their development are assessed in a multivariate, multimethod fashion, including observed, parent-reported and self-reported data. The current article summarizes and updates recent findings from LIST. For example, LIST provided evidence for the heritability of human values with the youngest sample to date, and the first genetic investigation of adolescents' identity formation. Finally, future aims of LIST are discussed.