Genetic and environmental influences on sexual orientation and its correlates in an Australian twin sample.

Abstract

We recruited twins systematically from the Australian Twin Registry and assessed their sexual orientation and 2 related traits: childhood gender nonconformity and continuous gender identity. Men and women differed in their distributions of sexual orientation, with women more likely to have slight-to-moderate degrees of homosexual attraction, and men more likely to have high degrees of homosexual attraction. Twin concordances for nonheterosexual orientation were lower than in prior studies. Univariate analyses showed that familial factors were important for all traits, but were less successful in distinguishing genetic from shared environmental influences. Only childhood gender nonconformity was significantly heritable for both men and women. Multivariate analyses suggested that the causal architecture differed between men and women, and, for women, provided significant evidence for the importance of genetic factors to the traits' covariation.

Cites (6)

1. Alternative Ways of Assessing Model Fit
   Browne, Michael W., Cudeck, Robert · 1992 · Sociological Methods & Research
2. Methodology for Genetic Studies of Twins and Families
   Neale, Michael C., Cardon, Lon R. · 1992
3. Genetic covariation between neuroticism and the symptoms of anxiety and depression
   Jardine, R., Martin, N. G., Henderson, A. S., Rao, D. C. · 1984 · Genetic Epidemiology
4. The use of likelihood-based confidence intervals in genetic models
   Neale, Michael C., Miller, Michael B. · 1997 · Behavior Genetics
5. The Multifactorial Model of Disease Transmission: I. Description of the Model and its use in Psychiatry
   Reich, Theodore, Cloninger, C. Robert, Guze, Samuel B. · 1975 · British Journal of Psychiatry
6. Participation bias in a sexuality survey: psychological and behavioural characteristics of responders and non-responders
   Dunne, M., Martin, N., Bailey, J., Heath, A., Bucholz, K., Madden, P., Statham, D. · 1997 · International Journal of Epidemiology

Show all 6 references

Cited by (11)

1. Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior
   Ganna, Andrea, Verweij, Karin J. H., Nivard, Michel G., Maier, Robert, Wedow, Robbee, Busch, Alexander S., Abdellaoui, Abdel, Guo, Shengru, Sathirapongsasuti, J. Fah, 23andMe Research Team et al. · 2019 · Science
2. Mostly Heterosexual and Mostly Gay/Lesbian: Evidence for New Sexual Orientation Identities
   Vrangalova, Zhana, Savin-Williams, Ritch C. · 2012 · Archives of Sexual Behavior
3. Gender and sexual orientation differences in sexual response to sexual activities versus gender of actors in sexual films.
   Chivers, Meredith L., Seto, Michael C., Blanchard, Ray · 2007 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
4. Mostly heterosexual as a distinct sexual orientation group: A systematic review of the empirical evidence
   Savin-Williams, Ritch C., Vrangalova, Zhana · 2013 · Developmental Review
5. Biological versus nonbiological older brothers and men’s sexual orientation
   Bogaert, Anthony F. · 2006 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

See all 538