Inherited dreams: A twin study of future orientation and heritability among chinese adolescents

ABSTRACT

Future orientation tends to prevent engagement in risk behaviours and results in good academic performance among adolescents. Our study aimed to establish whether genetic factors contributed to future orientation among Chinese adolescents. We recruited 988 pairs of twins from Beijing. By constructing a high-order A (additive genetic variance) C (common environmental variance) E (unique environmental variance) model, we found that heritability and a common environment contributed significantly to the development of future orientation among adolescents. Moreover, this study did not detect significant heritability differences in future orientation between girls and boys. In addition, there was a negative relationship between age and heritability of future orientation but a positive relationship between age and non-shared environmental effect on the development of future orientation. Our findings provide empirical evidence for the heritability of future orientation, suggesting that both genetics and common environment influence its development.

KEYWORDS:

• Future orientation
• chinese adolescents
• heritability
• twin study

Data Archiving and Sharing

Authors agree to share the data and other artefacts supporting the results in the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical Statement

The university ethics committee approved the study and confirmed that it conforms to Declaration of Helsinki. All participants gave their informed consent prior to their inclusion in the study.

Author Contributions

Development of the study design and funding was led by YG

LZ,YG, JC, and XL contributed to the design of the study.

Testing and data collection, data base management were coordinated by JC, and XL.

LZ did the statistical analyses statistical analysis.

LZ drafted the initial version of the manuscript.

All authors interpreted the data and revised the initial draft.

YG collated changes proposed by all of the authors into the final draft paper before final approval by all of the named co-authors.

All authors had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.

All authors critically reviewed and approved the final version.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a research grant 31571154 from National Science Foundation of China.