Disadvantaged contexts come in myriad forms and are widely known to predict antisocial behavior, including both physical aggression and non-aggressive rule-breaking. These predictions go beyond simple phenotypic associations, with research now indicating that genetic and environmental influences on antisocial behavior also vary as a function of neighborhood disadvantage. These findings are typically interpreted as evidence of a bioecological genotype environment interaction (GxE), such that genetic influences may be most strongly expressed in 'average, expectable environments' while environmental influences are strongest in impoverished contexts. Because extant studies are limited in their conceptualization of disadvantage, however, it is unclear whether the findings related to neighborhood disadvantage also apply to familial and school disadvantage. The current study sought to fill this gap in the literature by examining multiple forms of disadvantage as etiologic moderators of aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behavior, respectively, in a sample of 1,030 pairs of school-aged twins enriched for disadvantage. It was hypothesized that each measure of disadvantage would independently and synergistically moderate the etiology of antisocial behavior in ways consistent with the predictions of the bioecological model. Two factors underlay the indicators of disadvantage included in the current study. Proximal disadvantage comprised two familial indicators and moderated the etiology of rule-breaking behavior in a way that was consistent with a diathesis-stress model, amplifying the additive genetic variance. Contextual disadvantage, by contrast, comprised one school and two neighborhood indicators and augmented the effect of the shared environment on rule-breaking, as predicted by the bioecological model. Follow-up nuclear twin family model analyses further indicated that this increase in shared environmental influence represented a true environmental effect, rather than an increase in passive gene environment correlation or assortative mating. The two indicators of disadvantage had comparatively little effect on the etiology of aggression and did not interact with one another as etiologic moderators. Implications and future research directions are discussed.
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