Social behaviour

Social behaviour

The acquisition of social skills enables children to engage successfully in peer relationships and friendship networks. Mastering these skills plays an important role during development and has long-term effects on individual well-being, self-esteem, positive engagement, problem solving skills and resilience^{1, 2}. In turn, peer relationships offer opportunities for acquiring social norms and learning new social skills^3-5.

There are many facets of social skills. Prosocial behaviour describes a positive interaction with people through helping, sharing, cooperating, and comforting other impacting on peer relationships^{6, 7}. Infants, as early as two years of age, have been shown to help, comfort, share, and cooperate with others^{8, 9}. It is thought that young children express a “ready prosociality”⁹, irrespective of reward. This behaviour may reflect an early biological mechanism that, as an evolutionary advantageous social strategy, facilitates the response to early social cues⁸ and supports the development of first peer relationships⁴. While prosocial skills involve behaviour that benefits others, peer problems indicate the rejection by peers¹⁰. Children with peer problems have no ‘good’ friends, are ‘not liked’ or ‘harassed’ by other children¹¹. Peer problems have been associated with aggressive, hyperactive and/or oppositional behaviour, but children with peer problems might also be socially withdrawn and less sociable than others⁴. However, the behavioural spectrum of social skills associated with friendship networks changes during childhood and adolescence, as distinct developmental stages¹ may draw out different genetic propensities¹².

Aims

In this genome-wide association meta-analysis we aim to identify genetic variants (and their changes) that affect social behaviour during early childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Therefore, we combine genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics across different social traits, different ages, different raters and sex.

Study information

Social behaviour scores included in this study were assessed using various validated instruments (Table 1). If you have any questions about the study or would like to participate, please contact Beate St Pourcain (beate.stpourcain@mpi.nl).

Table 1: Psychological instruments assessing social behaviour

References

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6. Hay, D.F. Prosocial Development. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 35, 29-71 (1994).
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12. St Pourcain, B., et al. Heritability and genome-wide analyses of problematic peer relationships during childhood and adolescence. Human Genetics 134, 539-551 (2015).
13. Price, A.L., et al. Principal components analysis corrects for stratification in genome-wide association studies. Nat Genet 38, 904-909 (2006).
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19. Pulkkinen, L., Vaalamo, I., Hietala, R., Kaprio, J. & Rose, R.J. Peer reports of adaptive behavior in twins and singletons: is twinship a risk or an advantage? Twin Research and Human Genetics 6, 106-118 (2003).