Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 1,254), the authors investigated whether marriage can foster desistance from delinquency and violence by moderating genetic effects. In contrast to existing gene–environment research that typically focuses on one or a few genetic polymorphisms, they extended a recently developed mixed linear model to consider the collective influence of 580 single nucleotide polymorphisms in 64 genes related to aggression and

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... y behavior. The mixed linear model estimates the proportion of variance in the phenotype that is explained by the single nucleotide polymorphisms. The authors found that the proportion of variance in delinquency/violence explained was smaller among married individuals than unmarried individuals. Because selection, confounding, and heterogeneity may bias the estimate of the Gene × Marriage interaction, they conducted a series of analyses to address these issues. The findings suggest that the Gene × Marriage interaction results were not seriously affected by these issues.