Chunk #51 — Discussion — Structure and Etiology of Behavioral Disinhibition Components Across Adolescence — Individual components of behavioral disinhibition
Twin resemblance for novelty seeking decreased substantially from age 12 to age 17, resulting in a lower estimate of heritability (a2 = .28) in late adolescence, as compared with early adolescence (a2 = .50). Notably, this difference in heritability at the two ages was not due to diminished reliability in the novelty-seeking measure at age 17. In fact, internal consistency was quite comparable for the TCI (age 12; α = .68) and the TPQ (age 17; α = .72). We know of no previously published studies of the heritability of adolescent novelty seeking outside our own laboratory. However, constraint, defined as the tendency to inhibit behavioral impulses and to prefer boring but safe activities to exciting but dangerous activities (thus negatively correlated with novelty seeking; Waller, Lilienfeld, Tellegen, & Lyyken, 1991), has been shown to be moderately heritable in older adolescents and significantly related to a latent externalizing construct (Krueger et al., 2002).
