Citation

Jones MB, Jones DR. J. Psychiatr. Res. 1995; 29(3): 193-209.

Affiliation

Department of Behavioral Science, Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, Hershey 17033, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1995, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

7473296

Abstract

A behavioral disorder is "contagious" if the risk to a given individual increases when someone in that person's vicinity, family, or social group develops the disorder. So understood, behavioral contagion may be involved in criminality, conduct disorder, drug abuse, suicide, and teenage pregnancy. Previous papers have shown that contagion generates highly distinctive result patterns, from which its presence may be inferred. The patterns concern prevalence in sibships of different size and, in case-control designs, the number of susceptible sibs that affected and unaffected individuals have. The present paper extends the analysis by allowing the likelihood of transmission from one sib to another to vary according as the two sibs are of the same or opposite gender, male or female, single borns or co-twins, fraternal or identical twins. The extension is illustrated by application to data on criminality in Danish twins previously reported by other workers. We will show that the distribution of criminality by gender and zygosity is better explained in terms of behavioral contagion than by previous analyses.

Language: en