Personality and Individual Differences
Gene × Environment Interaction Visualiser
Three theories, two straight lines, and one decision about who to recruit. Name the pattern before you see the rest of the range.
Simulated — fictional sensitivity scores, no gene and no clinical outcome
Learning objective
By the end you should be able to tell diathesis–stress from differential susceptibility by their patterns, and say how the sampled range decides which one you appear to see.
About 25 minutes. Nothing you do here is saved or sent anywhere.
What is absent
No gene is named and no genotype appears — the grouping variable is a fictional sensitivity score. No disorder, diagnosis or clinical risk estimate is used; the outcome axis is an unnamed standardised outcome. A slope here is an average tendency across a group, never a prediction about a person, and no figure corresponds to any published finding.
A study reports this
Two groups differing on a fictional sensitivity score, plotted against environmental quality. This is what the study collected.
The higher-sensitivity group does worse as the environment worsens. The two groups converge towards the right-hand edge of what was measured.
The rest of the range
The explorer
Move the crossover, change the slopes, and restrict the window. The label beneath the graph names whichever pattern the visible data support — which is all a study ever has.
Key terms
- Diathesis–stress
- A pattern in which one group fares worse than the other in adverse conditions and no better in favourable ones.
- Differential susceptibility
- A pattern in which one group fares worse in adverse conditions and better in favourable ones, so that the two lines cross.
- Crossover point
- Where the two lines meet.
- Range restriction
- Sampling only part of the environmental range, leaving the rest of the picture unobserved.
Two sensitivity groups
Every value is model-implied from parameters you control. The shaded areas are parts of the environmental range your study did not sample.
| Where | Higher sensitivity | Lower sensitivity | Difference |
|---|
What the visible data support
Challenge — what would license the claim?
A paper claims differential susceptibility rather than diathesis–stress. Which of these would actually support that claim? Select all that apply.
What this demonstrates
Diathesis-stress, differential susceptibility and vantage sensitivity are the same two lines meeting at different places. Which one a study reports depends on how much of the environment it sampled: narrow the range and a crossover that is really there disappears, or an ordinary difference in slope starts to look like one.
For teaching elsewhere: take this activity as one self-contained block of HTML, on the clipboard or as a file. Either way it is styled so that it will not disturb the page you put it into.