Child and Youth Lab, Department of Psychology, Sigmund Freud University, Ripa di Porta Ticinese 77, 20143, Milan, Italy.
Centre for Behavioural Sciences and Mental Health, Istituto Superiore Di Sanità, Rome, Italy.
Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2021 Apr;30(4):607-617. doi: 10.1007/s00787-020-01543-2. Epub 2020 May 7.
Higher levels of anger expression, as well as lower levels of anger control, have been reported for adults with anxiety disorders compared to individuals without anxiety disorders. Different to the research on adults, very few studies examined the relationship between anxiety and anger in childhood. In our study, we investigated 398 Italian twin pairs (74 MZ male, 70 MZ female, 134 same-sex dizygotic-53 male, 81 female-, and 120 unlike-sex dizygotic twin pairs), aged 8-17 (mean 13.06 ± 2.59): (i) the heritability of a childhood anger phenotype; (ii) the association between five anxiety domains and anger; (iii) the role of possible common etiological factors in explaining the observed comorbidity and overlap in the risk between anxiety phenotypes and anger. The study demonstrated that anger, assessed by CBCL items, is heritable in children at a similar rate to prior studies (40%). Our research found low to moderate rate of correlation between anger and anxiety (from 0.10 to 0.19). Finally, the present study found that the majority of etiological influences on anxiety and anger are independent of each other. Data showed that shared environmental influences have some small effects on the phenotypic covariation between the anxiety phenotypes and anger (12%); whereas unique environmental influences have an almost negligible effect (1%). Our analyses did not reveal the effect of genetic effects in explaining the covariation between these phenotypes.
与没有焦虑障碍的个体相比，患有焦虑障碍的成年人表现出更高水平的愤怒情绪以及更低水平的愤怒控制能力。与成年人的研究不同，很少有研究检查儿童时期焦虑与愤怒之间的关系。在我们的研究中，我们调查了 398 对意大利双胞胎（74 对同性别 MZ 男性，70 对同性别 MZ 女性，134 对同性别的 DZ-53 男性，81 对女性，120 对异性的 DZ 双胞胎），年龄在 8-17 岁之间（平均 13.06±2.59）：（i）儿童愤怒表型的遗传性；（ii）五个焦虑领域与愤怒之间的关联；（iii）可能的共同病因因素在解释观察到的焦虑表型和愤怒之间的共病和重叠风险中的作用。该研究表明，通过 CBCL 项目评估的愤怒在儿童中具有与先前研究相似的遗传性（40%）。我们的研究发现愤怒与焦虑之间的相关性较低至中度（从 0.10 到 0.19）。最后，本研究发现，焦虑和愤怒的大多数病因影响彼此独立。数据表明，共享环境影响对焦虑表型和愤怒之间的表型变异有一些小的影响（12%）；而独特的环境影响几乎可以忽略不计（1%）。我们的分析没有揭示遗传效应在解释这些表型之间的变异中的作用。
