Psychiatry and genetics : psychosocial, ethical, and legal considerations / edited by Michael A. Sperber, Lissy F. Jarvik.

Date:
[1976], ©1976
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Psychiatry and genetics : psychosocial, ethical, and legal considerations / edited by Michael A. Sperber, Lissy F. Jarvik. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    41/224 (page 24)
    24 LISSY F. JARVIK The situation is still far from clear, but the best available evidence in¬ dicates the involvement of the sex chromosome in the transmission of spatial ability. Stafford hypothesized a sex-linked recessive mode of in¬ heritance of spatial ability on the basis of two observations.®^ First, males had a higher mean score on spatial tasks than females, an obser¬ vation known for some time. Second, a unique pattern of correlations arose from Stafford's data: unlike-sex parent-child pairs (i.e., mother-son and father-daughter) exhibited a higher correlation on spatial test scores than like-sex parent-child pairs (i.e., mother-daughter and father-son).®^ These observations imply a sex-linked recessive inheritance but are not inconsistent with autosomal inheritance. Support for sex linkage also comes from McClearn,®^ and familial correlations similar to Stafford's were seen in the work of Hartlage. Finally, with a larger sample popu¬ lation, Bock and Kolakowski arrived at similar correlation patterns; in combining the results of these three studies, they provided convincing evidence for X-linked recessive inheritance for spatial ability. Of particular interest to psychiatrists is the psychosexual develop¬ ment of a group of individuals essentially without gonads. First, neither psychiatric disorders nor homosexuality appear to be any more common in this group than in the population at large.®® Since most of the patients with Turner syndrome are phenotypically female, they are generally brought up as girls. Money, who with his associates has carried on the most extensive studies in this area, concludes that these girls are un¬ equivocally feminine, with age- and sex-appropriate play, daydreams, interests, and attitudes. During adolescence, however, they tend to be greatly concerned about their physical appearance, and the development of emotional maturity seems to be directly related to the rate of physical maturation. Money found that those girls most delayed in physical de¬ velopment and most dwarfed tended also to be the most childish and conforming. In general, girls with gonadal dysgenesis grow up being fond of children and make excellent adoptive mothers. EXTRA SEX CHROMOSOME Triple-X females (47,xxx). In a sense, the 47,XXX genotype is just the opposite of the 45, XO genotype, there being an extra X chro¬ mosome rather than a missing one. These women are generally free of