MTR: Minnesota Twin Research Collaboration
The Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research (MCTFR) is a long-running research program at the University of Minnesota focused on understanding how genetics and environment shape personality, relationships, cognition, and mental health across the lifespan. One of its major projects, the Minnesota Multi-Ethnic Twin Registry (MTR), follows thousands of twin pairs over time to better understand individual differences in development, behavior, and well-being.
Our lab collaborates on the daily diary portion of the MTR study, led by Dr. Susan South and the Purdue team. This component uses intensive, real-time data collection to capture participants’ day-to-day experiences, allowing us to examine how personality, emotions, relationships, and cognitive functioning unfold in everyday life.
In addition, graduate student Lily Jensen’s first-year project builds on this work by examining how early personality predicts later relationship satisfaction across development. Using data from MTR and the Midlife Twin Family Study (MTFS), her project takes a longitudinal approach to understanding how these patterns emerge from adolescence through later adulthood.
Together, this collaboration reflects a broader goal of understanding how personality, cognition, and relationships evolve over time, using large-scale, longitudinal data to capture both stability and change across the lifespan.
More Studies:
CADI
PASAR
REACH
examines how social experiences—like loneliness, isolation, and relationship stress—relate to changes in cognitive functioning in daily life. Building on the MTR framework, this study focuses on older adults to better understand how everyday interpersonal dynamics may contribute to cognitive decline and risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
examines the impact of parenting stress on relationship satisfaction. Using daily data, this study captures how stress, communication, and child-related conflict influence couples’ relationships from moment to moment, helping identify factors that may strengthen or strain partnerships.
examines the longitudinal association between racial discrimination and relationship dissatisfaction in collaboration with the ACT Lab (Dr. David Rollock). Extending prior work (the REACH study), it focuses on whether dyadic coping—the ways partners support each other during stress—helps explain how experiences of discrimination shape relationship functioning and psychological distress over time.