Current evidence suggests moderate heritability of music phenotypes, such as music listening and achievement. However, other fundamental traits underlying people's interest in music and its relevance for their lives have been largely neglected, and little is known about the genetic and environmental etiology of what we refer to as musical sensibility—the tendency to be emotionally and aesthetically engaged by music. This study investigated the latent structure, as well as the genetic and environmental factors influencing individual variability in multiple domains of musical sensibility, and the etiological architecture of the relationship between the dimensions. To this end, we used phenotypic confirmatory factor analytic and biometric twin modeling to analyze self-reported ratings on four dimensions of musical sensibility in a sample of Norwegian twins (N = 2600). The results indicate a phenotypic higher-order structure, whereby both the resulting general musical sensibility factor and the conceptually narrower domains were strongly heritable (49–65%). Multivariate analyses of the genetic and environmental covariance further revealed substantial overlap in genetic variance across domains.

中文翻译：

---

音乐感性的底层结构：一个一般因素、四个子维度和强大的遗传效应


目前的证据表明，音乐表型的遗传性适中，例如听音乐和成就。然而，人们对音乐的兴趣及其与生活的相关性背后的其他基本特征在很大程度上被忽视了，而且人们对我们所说的音乐敏感性的遗传和环境病因知之甚少——在情感和审美上被音乐所吸引的倾向。本研究调查了潜在结构，以及影响音乐敏感性多个领域个体变异性的遗传和环境因素，以及维度之间关系的病因结构。为此，我们使用表型验证因子分析和生物特征双胞胎模型来分析挪威双胞胎样本 （N = 2600） 中对音乐敏感性四个维度的自我报告评分。结果表明一种表型高阶结构，其中产生的一般音乐敏感性因子和概念上较窄的域都是强遗传的 （49-65%）。遗传和环境协方差的多变量分析进一步揭示了跨领域遗传方差的大量重叠。