Showing posts with label ADHD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ADHD. Show all posts

Saturday, February 27, 2016

You're similar to your spouse in so many ways ...

You already knew that spouses were correlated for intelligence.



R Plomin and I J Deary have this to say:
" ... Assortative mating is greater for intelligence (spouse correlations ~0.40) than for other behavioural traits such as personality and psychopathology (~0.10) or physical traits such as height and weight (~0.20)."

Here's what a correlation of 0.4 looks like (top right).


Marginal Revolution gets excited about this result though:
"Nordsletten and colleagues find an amazing amount of assortative mating within psychiatric disorders.

"Spouse tetrachoric correlations are greater than 0.40 for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and schizophrenia.

"The next highest spouse correlation emerged for substance abuse (range, 0.36-0.39).

"Assortative mating was significant but far less substantial for other disorders, such as affective disorders (range, 0.14-0.19)."
They conclude:
"Beyond genetics and genomics, assortative mating matters because it means that the person closest to an individual with a psychiatric disorder is also likely to have psychiatric problems, which could exacerbate problems for both spouses and their offspring."
The ubiquity of assortative mating - who knew?