Activity: Academic talk or presentation types › Oral presentation
Description
The talk focuses on the “puzzle of parallel structures” (McCrae et al., 2001, Journal of Personality, pp. 515), whereby the co-variance structures of personality characteristics are very similar at genetic, environmental and phenotypic levels. This is puzzling because there is no a priori reason for such similarity. A powerful test of this phenomenon is presented, based on 240 personality items measured in nearly 3,000 pairs of twins; given that, on average, more than half of the genetic variance in individual items is unique to them, item-level analyses are well suited for this purpose. Possible explanations as well as implications for personality development and measurement are discussed.