At this point in time, very little is known about the specific shared and nonshared environmental experiences that influence neuroticism. Several studies have found modest correlations between neuroticism scores in adults and their retrospective recall of intrusive parenting (Reti et al., 2002), having been abused during childhood (Allen & Lauterbach, 2007; Roy, 2002), lack of religious upbringing (Willemsen & Boomsma, 2007), and low parental involvement (McCrae & Costa, 1988) when they were children. A search of the literature did not locate any published studies that prospectively linked parenting in childhood to the offspring’s later neuroticism, however. Retrospective studies are useful for generating hypotheses about potential environmental influences on personality, but they are highly subject to potentially serious recall biases. Thus, there is a clear and pressing need for longitudinal studies that can test hypotheses prospectively regarding the causal influence of specific experiences on later neuroticism (Rutter, 2007b). These would need to determine that such early experiences influence future neuroticism when early measures of neuroticism are controlled and rule out relevant confounds, such as shared genetic influences between the experience and
