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What Can an Adoption Study Tell Us About the Effect of Prenatal Environment on a Trait?
1Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A8000, Austin, TX, 78712-0187, USA. loehlin@utexas.edu.
Abstract:
Adoption studies provide possibilities for estimating the extent to which prenatal environmental events account for individual differences on a trait. Correlations with birth mothers but not adoptive mothers suggest the presence of genetic or prenatal environmental effects; higher correlations with birth mothers than with birth fathers suggest the presence of the latter. Changes over time may also be relevant. The concepts involved are illustrated with parent-child IQ correlations from the Texas and Colorado Adoption Projects.
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