Links among perception, threat appraisals, and adjustment all may be qualified by what Grych and Fincham (1990) termed contextual factors. Heavily studied are factors related to family relationships such as parental warmth and support or family emotional climate (Davies et al., 2002; DeBoard-Lucas, Fosco, Raynor, & Grych, 2010; Fosco & Grych, 2007). Child characteristics, such as gender or temperament (Davies & Lindsay, 2004; Lengua & Long, 2002), have received relatively little attention, however. This omission is conspicuous when viewed from a behavioral genetic perspective. For example, it is well established within behavioral genetic studies that many child characteristics, ranging from children’s temperament (Rowe & Plomin, 1977) to the perceptions of parenting they receive (Rowe, 1981, 1983), have significant genetic influence. Thus, a child’s genotype may play an important role in modifying how individual children perceive exposure to interparental conflict (see also D’Onofrio & Lahey, 2010; Horwitz & Neiderhiser, 2011). Recent studies involving candidate genes, interpreted in the framework of the DST (Ellis et al., 2011), have led to new insights regarding parental effects on child outcomes (see Simons et al., 2013, for a recent parenting example).
