Does Childhood Maltreatment Cause Trouble Later On?

A new meta-analysis has dropped that sought to answer the question of whether childhood maltreatment leads to later mental health problems. This study is different from typical in that it tried to address the ever-pervasive problem of genetic confounding.

Old-school readers of my blog know what I’m talking about: the overwhelming majority of studies in human science, both medical and psychological, are flawed because they don’t take genetically-caused individual variation into account:

One great example is the association between income and IQ. People from impoverished backgrounds have lower IQs, on average, than people from wealthier backgrounds. Modern Western conventional wisdom assumes that poverty causes low IQ, when the reality is in fact the other way around: lower IQ people are less able, on average, to accumulate and generate wealth and (since IQ is highly heritable) more likely to come from…