The Whole Person and Psychological Well-Being

In a remarkable article, published in 1989 (see Arvey et al., 1991), Richard Arvey and his colleagues produced results that appeared to show that job satisfaction is inherited! At face value this is a very peculiar result indeed because, as we saw in Chapter 3, job satisfaction is supposed to be an appraisal of how we feel about our job. How can this be inherited? Arvey and his colleagues carried out a classic type of study that is used by researchers who are interested in inherited characteristics — a kinship study (see also Chapter 2 of this book). In these studies researchers focus on naturally occurring examples of people who vary from being very closely related, such as identical (monozygotic) twins who are from the same fertilized egg and hence genetically identical, through to unrelated pairs of people. They also take into account whether the people shared a common environment or were brought up apart — as in the case of twins separated from each other at birth and raised separately. This provides an array of people who have varying degrees of genetic and environmental similarity. At one extreme there are identical twins reared together who have common genes and environment. At the other extreme there are unrelated people reared apart who do not share a common environment or genetic background.