Person and personality
Reference:
Berezina T.N. —
The Influence of Biological Factors on Life Expectancy in a Twin Couple
// Psychologist.
– 2016. – ¹ 6.
– P. 36 - 45.
DOI: 10.7256/2409-8701.2016.6.21305 URL: http://en. nbpublish.com/library_read_article.php?id=21305
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Review:
Biological factors that influence life expectancy (except for heredity) traditionally include: gender and causes of death. Heredity defines genetic determination of a life path, gender represents a biological factor which influence is conditioned by culture, causes of death can be endogenous (death as a result of natural causes) and exogeneous (death caused by environment factors). The impact of both causes of death considerably depends on the social environment. In her research Berezina has used a classical twin method to collect empirical data and analyzed 172 twin couples including 100 monozygotic couples. The novelty is caused by the fact that Berezina uses a one-factor dispersion analysis ANOVA to assess the influence of the aforesaid factors on life expectancy. The method allows not only to compare the roles of heredity and environment (which is quite traditional for psychogenetics) but also to evaluate the effect of other factors on an individual's life expectancy. The results of the research have proved patterns that have been already recorded by demographic studies: death causes have the greater influence on life expectancy and violent deaths reduce one's length of life twice as much as natural cuases. At the present time gender also influences life expectancy and women have a higher life expectancy. The role of heredity is more important than that of the environment, however, heredity is represented only as tendencies. The author suggests to use her method to further evaluate the importance of more complex environmental and personality factors.
Keywords:
causes of death, mortality, sex, twin couple, twin method, environment, heredity, life expectancy, psychogenetics, dispersive analysis
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