A School-based Twin Study of Handedness among Adolescents in Taiwan

This study aimed to evaluate whether twinning might influence handedness and the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to handedness in a total of 321 pairs of twins, 36 same-sex sib-pairs, and 1020 singletons, aged 12–16 and systematically recruited from the junior high schools in Taipei. Twins’ zygosity was determined by a combination of DNA typing and physical similarity. The direction and consistency of handedness in twins did not differ from that seen in singletons. Compared with the full model containing additive genes (A), shared (C), and non-shared (E) environment, both AE and CE models had equivalently acceptable fit. The contribution from additive genes in the AE model was estimated to be 16% (directional) to 13% (consistent) for the continuous handedness and 34–10% for the categorical one, whereas the corresponding contribution from shared environment in the CE model was 14–14% and 32–11%, respectively. Handedness in adolescents appears to be not influenced by twinning and not substantially heritable, whereas environmental factors, especially those not shared between siblings, are the most important ones for explaining individual variations.