title: The genetic and environmental aetiology of spatial, mathematics and general anxiety.
abstract: Individuals differ in their level of general anxiety as well as in their level of anxiety towards specific activities, such as mathematics and spatial tasks. Both specific anxieties correlate moderately with general anxiety, but the aetiology of their association remains unexplored. Moreover, the factor structure of spatial anxiety is to date unknown. The present study investigated the factor structure of spatial anxiety, its aetiology, and the origins of its association with general and mathematics anxiety in a sample of 1,464 19-21-year-old twin pairs from the UK representative Twins Early Development Study. Participants reported their general, mathematics and spatial anxiety as part of an online battery of tests. We found that spatial anxiety is a multifactorial construct, including two components: navigation anxiety and rotation/visualization anxiety. All anxiety measures were moderately heritable (30% to 41%), and non-shared environmental factors explained the remaining variance. Multivariate genetic analysis showed that, although some genetic and environmental factors contributed to all anxiety measures, a substantial portion of genetic and non-shared environmental influences were specific to each anxiety construct. This suggests that anxiety is a multifactorial construct phenotypically and aetiologically, highlighting the importance of studying anxiety within specific contexts.
authors.affiliation: MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, King's College London, UK.|Tomsk State University, Russia.
authors.forename: Margherita
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Malanchini
authors.affiliation: MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, King's College London, UK.
authors.forename: Kaili
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Rimfeld
authors.affiliation: MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, King's College London, UK.
authors.forename: Nicholas G
authors.initials: NG
authors.lastname: Shakeshaft
authors.affiliation: Tomsk State University, Russia.|Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, UK.
authors.forename: Maja
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rodic
authors.affiliation: MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, King's College London, UK.
authors.forename: Kerry
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Schofield
authors.affiliation: MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, King's College London, UK.
authors.forename: Saskia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Selzam
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA.
authors.forename: Philip S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Dale
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
authors.forename: Stephen A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Petrill
authors.affiliation: MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, King's College London, UK.|Tomsk State University, Russia.|Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths University of London, UK.
authors.forename: Yulia
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kovas
mesh_terms: D001007:Anxiety / Q000235:genetics*; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D040582:Inheritance Patterns / Q000235:genetics; D008297:Male; D008433:Mathematics; D008957:Models, Genetic; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D010641:Phenotype; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D065853:Spatial Learning; D014429:Twins, Dizygotic / Q000235:genetics; D014430:Twins, Monozygotic / Q000235:genetics