Because intimate violence tends to run in families, social learning theory posits that children learn to be violent through watching their parents and through being reinforced for their own aggressive behaviors. This account of intimate partner violence considers only environmental influences on familial resemblance, but familial resemblance may also be due to genetic factors. A genetically sen...

Testis size is an important feature of male pubertal development. The genetic and environmental contributions to variation in human testis size have hardly been studied. We estimated the heritability of human testicular size in a group of mono- and dizygotic twins and their non-twin brothers (145 twins and 20 brothers from 95 families). Participants were 18 years old on average and all had reac...

Even though autoimmune diseases are heterogeneous, believed to result from the interaction between genetic and environmental components, patients with these disorders exhibit reproducible patterns of gene expression in their peripheral blood mononuclear cells. A portion of this gene expression profile is a property of familial resemblance rather than autoimmune disease. Here, we wanted to ident...

The role of genetic and environmental factors determining the variability in alcohol consumption levels was investigated in 68 families ascertained through heroin-dependent Jewish male probands. Sibling correlations for peak weekly alcohol consumption ranged from 0.22 to 0.32, with limited changes on adjustment for sex, age and environmental variables. The parent-child correlations were relativ...

Background: Although parental obesity is a well-established predisposing factor for the development of obesity, associations between regional body compositions, resting metabolic rates (RMR), and physical activity (PA) of parents and their pre-school children remain unknown. The objective of this study was to investigate parent-child correlations for total and regional body compositions, restin...