Genes behind kids’ phone addiction

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Australia: Researchers have linked kids' mobile phone use to the genes their parents passed on to them, according to the Sydney daily. To look at how our hard-wired genetic make-up influences our mobile phone use, the researchers used data on teenage Australian identical twins gathered by the Queensland Institute of Medical Research - one of the biggest and most respected programs of its type in the world.

The results showed that the amount of time spent talking or texting is highly inheritable, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

It found that about half of the difference in mobile phone talking and texting between the 1000 teenagers surveyed, was due to their genes. The study also suggested smart people use their phones less.

Lead author Dr Geoffrey Miller, from the psychology department at the University of New Mexico, said the study is one of the first to look at the link between genes and consumer behaviour.

"One of the big misconceptions that almost everybody has is that you can only have genes for things that evolved in the past. That was one of the things we wanted to demonstrate in an in-your-face way: that even with a technology that's only been around for a couple of decades, you can still have these latent genetic influences that will shape people's personality traits, their interests, their styles of social interaction," Dr Miller said. "Then those traits will play out in how they use a new technology," he added. The results were published recently in the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics.

(Agencies)

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Phone addiction, Phone addiction in kids, Kids’ gene

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