Parental emotional warmth, self-control and adolescent prosocial behavior: The moderating role of multilocus genetic and parental gender differences

Abstract: Previous quantitative genetic studies have demonstrated that adolescent self-control is influenced by parenting and genetics. In most existing studies, researchers have explored only the impact of the interaction between a single gene and parental factors on adolescent prosocial behaviour, but exploration of the endophenotype mechanism underlying the impact of the interaction between genes and the environment on prosocial behaviour is lacking. According to social cognitive models of prosocial behaviors, sociocognitive and socioemotive traits may be important mediators of environmental and genetic interactions on individual behaviors. In recent years, the single-polymorphism G×E design has been criticized for unreliable findings and difficult replication. As a potential solution, researchers have constructed multilocus genetic profile scores (MGPSs) to explore how environmental factors interact with genetic factors to predict adolescent development. Therefore, this study examined self-control as a mediator of the link between parental emotional warmth and adolescents’ prosocial behavior. Furthermore, this study developed an MGPS composed of five functional SNPs (COMT gene rs6269, HTR2A gene rs6313, OXTR gene rs53576, OXTR gene rs2254295, and OXTR gene rs2254298) and examined whether the MGPS moderates the mediating effect of self-control.
Using a 2-time longitudinal design (6 months apart), this study recruited 880 adolescents by cluster sampling at T1 in Guangzhou, China. All adolescents completed questionnaires about parental emotional warmth, prosocial behavior, and demographic characteristics and provided saliva samples for DNA extraction. At T2, 723 adolescents remained in the study and reported their prosocial behavior and self-control. All polymorphisms were genotyped using SNaPshot analysis (Applied Biosystems).
After controlling for the baseline levels of prosocial behavior, parental emotional warmth positively and significantly predicted adolescents’ prosocial behavior. Self-control mediated the link between parental emotional warmth and adolescents’ prosocial behavior. Furthermore, the MGPS moderated the mediating mechanism but not the direct impact of parental emotional warmth on adolescents’ prosocial behavior, and the model coefficients were invariant for mothers and fathers. Specifically, the MGPS moderated the effect of parental emotional warmth on self-control such that the effect was stronger in adolescents with higher MGPS than in those with lower MGPS. For adolescents with higher MGPS, parental emotional warmth was related to higher levels of self-control, which in turn increased prosocial behavior. However, this mediating effect was not observed among adolescents with lower MGPS.
The results highlight the importance of examining multiple genes and endophenotypic mechanisms to explore the relationship between gene–environmental interactions and adolescents’ prosocial behavior and provide new evidence for the “environment×polygene–endophenotypic–behavior” research framework.