The goal of this project is to take a behavioral genetics approach to skill in emotion recognition accuracy. The ALSPAC team provided its participants with Dr. Stephen Nowicki's emotion recognition test called the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA), in which respondents judged the emotions contained in facial expressions and vocal tones. Children completed this diagnostic during the Focus@8 session, and Main Carers completed this diagnostic in the Teen Focus 1 or Teen Focus 1 FastTk session. I propose to conduct two analyses of these existing data:

1. Convergence among twins

This analysis would compare the correlation of scores among Monozygotic twins (identical twins who share 100% of the same DNA) versus Dizygotic twins (fraternal twins who share 50% of their DNA). Greater convergence for MZs than DZs would suggest that there is a biological component to the development of emotional skill.

For this analysis, we would need to be able to identify who are the 195 pairs of twins (this number of twins was reported by the ALSPAC team, e.g., http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/sci-com/resource/recruit/). For each of these 195 pairs of twins, we would also need to be able to identify whether they are identical/MZ or fraternal/DZ. (This determination of MZ vs. DZ could be made using genetics data if it has not already been done for other purposes.)

2. Convergence between main carers and children

This analysis would establish the correlation of scores between children and their main carers. It would be valuable to identify which carers were biologically related vs. unrelated to the children, and to compare the magnitude of correlations for each type. If there is a sufficient number of biologically unrelated carers to make the comparison, greater convergence among related vs. unrelated carers would suggest that there is a biological component to the development of emotional skill. Even if there is not a sufficient number of biologically unrelated carers, the correlation between children and their main carers would be a valuable descriptive statistic that could be compared with the correlation for fraternal/DZ twins, given that both types of relatives share 50% of their DNA.

Control variables: For the above analyses, it would be valuable to include control variables of the sex of the child, their ethnicity, and their income / socio-economic status.