title: What Can an Adoption Study Tell Us About the Effect of Prenatal Environment on a Trait?
abstract: Adoption studies provide possibilities for estimating the extent to which prenatal environmental events account for individual differences on a trait. Correlations with birth mothers but not adoptive mothers suggest the presence of genetic or prenatal environmental effects; higher correlations with birth mothers than with birth fathers suggest the presence of the latter. Changes over time may also be relevant. The concepts involved are illustrated with parent-child IQ correlations from the Texas and Colorado Adoption Projects.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A8000, Austin, TX, 78712-0187, USA. loehlin@utexas.edu.
authors.forename: John C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Loehlin
mesh_terms: D000300:Adoption; D002648:Child; D003120:Colorado; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D010290:Parents; D011247:Pregnancy; D019655:Quantitative Trait, Heritable; D013781:Texas
keywords: Adoption; Adoptive parents; Birth parents; IQ; Prenatal environment