Abstract
In adults, psychiatric disorders are highly comorbid and are negatively associated with cognitive abilities. Individual cognitive measures have been linked with domains of child psychopathology, but the specificity of these associations and the extent to which they reflect shared genetic influences are unknown. In this study we examined the relationship between general factors of cognitive ability (g) and psychopathology (p) in early development using two genetically informative samples: the Texas “Tiny” Twin Project (TXtT; N = 626, age range = 0.16–6.31 years) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; N ≈ 1,300 individual twins, age range = 3.7–7.1 years). The total p–g correlation (−.21 in ECLS-B; −.34 in TXtT) was primarily attributable to genetic and shared environmental factors. The early age range of participants indicates that the p–g association is a reflection of overlapping genetic and shared environmental factors that operate in the first years of life.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
