“Biology-Environment Interaction and Evocative Biology-Environment Correlation: Contributions of Harsh Discipline and Parental Psychopathology to Problem Adolescent Behaviors”, 2003-05 (; backlinks):
Using an adoption paradigm, the Bioecological Model of development proposed by 1994 was tested by concurrently modeling for biology-environment interaction and evocative biology-environment correlation.
…Subjects from this study were recruited from 4 adoption agencies in the state of Iowa: Lutheran Social Services of Iowa; Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Dubuque; Hillcrest Family Services; and the Iowa Department of Human Services. Data were collected between the years of 1989 and 1992.
…A sample of 150 adult adoptees (ages, 18–45 years) provided retrospective reports of harsh adoptive parent discipline, which served as the environmental independent variables. Birth parent psychopathology served as the biological predictor. The dependent variables were retrospective adoptee and adoptive parent reports on adolescent aggressive and conduct-disordered behaviors. Finally, adoptees were classified as experiencing contextual environmental risk using the presence of two or more adverse factors in the adoptive home (eg. adoptive parent psychopathology) as the cutoff.
The contextual environment was found to moderate the biological process of evocative biology-environment correlation, providing empirical support for the 1994 Bioecological Model.
[Keywords: biology, environment, discipline, aggression, conduct disorder]