Although social researchers have been giving increasing attention to the effect of sibling position on personality formation and on subsequent behavior, in the past thirty years birth order as a factor in antisocial and problem behavior has been ignored. Yet earlier findings (3, 10, II, 13, 15) indicated that this relationship merited further study. Adler (I, pp. 376-382) held that first-borns ...

Risk attitudes play important roles in health behavior and everyday decision making. It is unclear, however, whether these attitudes can be predicted from birth order. We investigated 200 mostly male volunteers from two distinct settings. After correcting for multiple comparisons, for the number of siblings and for confounding by gender, ordinal position predicted perception of health-related r...

A knowledge of birth order can be contributory to the evaluation of hereditary and environmental factors in disease. There is, however, no agreement as to whether a characteristic birth order pattern exists in epilepsy. Thus Brain (1956) and Lennox (1960) have written respectively 'epilepsy is relatively commoner among first born children than among later members of the family' and 'birth order...

Studies on the birth order of patients with multiple sclerosis have yielded contradictory conclusions. Most of the sets of data, however, have been tested by biased tests. Data that have been submitted to unbiased tests seem to suggest that cases are more likely to occur in early birth ranks. This should be tested on further samples and some comments are offered on how this should be done.

In 1883, the year Elliott began battling melancholy, Teddy had already published his first book and been elected to the New York State assembly. By 1891—about the time Elliott, still unable to establish a career, had to be institutionalized to deal with his addictions—Teddy was U.S. Civil Service Commissioner and the author of eight books. Three years later, Elliott, 34, died of alcoholism. Sev...

According to F. J. Sulloway [Sulloway, F. J. (1996). Born to rebel. New York: Pantheon], firstborns can minimize the diversion of parental investment to younger siblings by upholding their parents’ beliefs, or the parental ‘‘status quo.’’ Maintenance of the status quo may translate into the pursuit of different sexual strategies as a function of birth order. Accordingly, Sulloway hypothesized t...

While birth-order effects have been investigated with respect to a large variety of behaviors (4, 7), one of the neglected areas has been that of health. Adler's observation that the oldest born tends to be conservative and to respect authority (2, pp. 378-379) suggests that such a person would be concerned about his health, act on this concern, and utilize institutional health care services wh...