Adolescent Familial Interactions: A Genetic Extension of the Social Relations Model

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper was to investigate genetic and environmental contributions to significant child actor effects (i.e. a person's tendency to behave in a similar way to all family members), child partner effects (i.e. a person's tendency to elicit similar interactions from all family members), and sibling relationship effects (i.e. factors unique to the sibling dyadic relationship) identified in an application of the Social Relations Model (SRM: Kenny & La Voie, 1984) to familial interaction data. We examined familial warmth, conflict, and self-disclosure about both positive and negative things in 60 nonadoptive and 44 adoptive families with siblings aged 8-17 years. Our goals were to assess sibling resemblance and to disentangle resemblance due to genetic heritage from resemblance due to environmental experiences for SRM effects identified as significant. Genetic influence was found for actor effects for conflict and self-disclosure about positive things. In contrast, dyadic relationship effects for warmth and self-disclosure about both positive and negative things showed no significant genetic influence. Moderate shared environmental influences were found for both actor and sibling relationship effects. However, most of the environmental influences for both actor and sibling relationship effects were of the nonshared variety, suggesting that unique environmental experiences are important for children's familial interactions.