Background: Previous research on cognitive styles (CSs) has often overlooked their complexity and the effect of the environment on their development. While research supports visual abilities as predictors of domain-specific creativity, there is a lack of studies on the predictive power of CS in relation to creativity beyond abilities. Aims: The…

An increasing body of research has indicated that childhood posttraumatic stress (PTS) is associated with different aspects of cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral functioning in childhood. That said, this study attempted to collect, map, and synthesize the existing knowledge regarding the effects of PTS on school-related behaviors of…

Feeling inhibited and socially not at ease is reflected in the trait social inhibition (SI). SI is associated with psychopathology that arises in young adulthood, such as anxiety. We aim for a better insight into the genetic and environmental contributions to SI across the life span, and as such examine their contributions to SI stability and…

Decades of research suggest that learning styles, or the belief that people learn better when they receive instruction in their dominant way of learning, may be one of the most pervasive myths about cognition. Nonetheless, little is known about what it means to believe in learning styles. The present investigation uses one theoretical…

Purpose: We evaluated genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in language skills during early adolescence, measured by both language sampling and standardized tests, and examined the extent to which these genetic and environmental effects are stable across time. Purpose: We evaluated genetic and environmental…

Researchers have identified sources of individual differences in writing across beginning and developing writers. The aim of the present study was to further clarify the sources of this variability by investigating the extent to which there are differences in genetic and environmental factors underlying the associations between lexical diversity,…

In this longitudinal study we examined the stability of general cognitive ability (GCA), as well as heterogeneity and genetic and environmental influences underlying individual differences in change. We investigated GCA from young adulthood through late midlife in 1,288 Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging participants at ages ~20, ~56, and ~62 years.…

The study examined the etiology of individual differences in early drawing and of its longitudinal association with school mathematics. Participants (N = 14,760), members of the Twins Early Development Study, were assessed on their ability to draw a human figure, including number of features, symmetry, and proportionality. Human figure drawing was…

The genetic effects on individual differences in reading development were examined using genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA) in a twin sample. In unrelated individuals (one twin per pair, n = 2,942), the GCTA-based heritability of reading fluency was ~20%-29% at ages 7 and 12. GCTA bivariate results showed that the phenotypic stability of…

The present study examined the genetic and environmental etiology of decision-making (Iowa Gambling Task; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), in a sample of twins at ages 11-13, 14-15, and 16-18 years. The variance across five 20-trial blocks could be explained by a latent "decision-making" factor within each of the three times of IGT…

Aging-related declines occur in many different domains of cognitive function during middle and late adulthood. However, whether a global dimension underlies individual differences in changes in different domains of cognition and whether global genetic influences on cognitive changes exist is less clear. We addressed these issues by applying…

Modern behavior-genetic studies of twins in the United States, Australia, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom show that genes account for most of the variance in children's reading ability by the end of the 1st year of formal reading instruction. Strong genetic influence continues across the grades, though the relevant genes vary for reading words…

Examined violent and nonviolent inner-city children's moral reasoning about violence in family and peer situations. All of the children condemned unprovoked violence. With provoked situations, the violent group focused more on the immorality of the provocation and perceived force akin to reciprocal justice, whereas the nonviolent group perceived…