genetic influence in psychopathology

Question 1

what do twin and family studies tell us

Answer 1

the omnibus influence of genes

Question 2

what do molecular genetic studies tell us

Answer 2

which actual genes are involved
Candidate gene studies: individual genees
GWAS: genome wide association studies

Question 3

what did (McGRuffin et al.,’s 1988) camberwell depression study find?

Answer 3

Proband: individual with depression
Prevalence in first degree relevance 39% compared to 10-15% in general population
Confounded with similar environmental risk factors

Question 4

what genetic explanations are there for depression from twin studies

Answer 4

Pairs of twins growing up in the same families
Estimate heritability (2x difference between correlation between monozygotic twins - correlation from dizygotic twins)
Also similar because of shared environment correlation in depressive score - heritability estimate
Different due to some non-shared environmental 1- heritability + shared environment
Amount of variance that might be due to genes, for a given population at a given time (0-1)