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Bidirectional Causal Associations Between Same-Sex Attraction and Psychological Distress: Testing Moderation and
Olakunle A Oginni1,2, Kai X Lim3, Qazi Rahman4
1The Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, Denmark Hill, SE5 8AF, UK. olakunle.oginni@kcl.ac.uk.
Abstract:
Only one study has examined bidirectional causality between sexual minority status (having same-sex attraction) and psychological distress. We combined twin and genomic data from 8700 to 9700 participants in the UK Twins Early Development Study cohort at ≈21 years to replicate and extend these bidirectional causal effects using separate unidirectional Mendelian Randomization-Direction of Causation models. We further modified these models to separately investigate sex differences, moderation by childhood factors (retrospectively-assessed early-life adversity and prospectively-assessed childhood gender nonconformity), and mediation by victimization. All analyses were carried out in OpenMx in R. Same-sex attraction causally influenced psychological distress with significant reverse causation (beta = 0.19 and 0.17; 95% CIs = 0.09, 0.29 and 0.08, 0.25 respectively) and no significant sex differences. The same-sex attraction → psychological distress causal path was partly mediated by victimization (12.5%) while the reverse causal path was attenuated by higher childhood gender nonconformity (moderation coefficient = -0.09, 95% CI: -0.13, -0.04).
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