Nature versus nurture is a long-standing debate in biology and society about the relative influence on human beings of their genetic inheritance (nature) and the environmental conditions of their development (nurture). The alliterative expression "nature and nurture" in English has been in use since at least the Elizabethan period and goes back to medieval French. The complementary combination of the two concepts is an ancient concept. Nature is what people think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception e.g. the product of exposure,experience and learning on an individual.
Twin studies are studies conducted on identical or fraternal twins. They aim to reveal the importance of environmental and genetic influences for traits,phenotypes,and disorders. Twin research is considered a key tool in behavioral genetics and in related fields,from biology to psychology. Twin studies are part of the broader methodology used in behavior genetics,which uses all data that are genetically informative –siblings studies,adoption studies,pedigree,etc. These studies have been used to track traits ranging from personal behavior to the presentation of severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.
Human behaviour genetics is an interdisciplinary subfield of behaviour genetics that studies the role of genetic and environmental influences on human behaviour. Classically,human behavioural geneticists have studied the inheritance of behavioural traits. The field was originally focused on determining the importance of genetic influences on human behaviour. It has evolved to address more complex questions such as:how important are genetic and/or environmental influences on various human behavioural traits;to what extent do the same genetic and/or environmental influences impact the overlap between human behavioural traits;how do genetic and/or environmental influences on behaviour change across development;and what environmental factors moderate the importance of genetic effects on human behaviour. The field is interdisciplinary,and draws from genetics,psychology,and statistics. Most recently,the field has moved into the area of statistical genetics,with many behavioural geneticists also involved in efforts to identify the specific genes involved in human behaviour,and to understand how the effects associated with these genes changes across time,and in conjunction with the environment.
Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. is an American psychologist known for his behavioral genetics studies of twins raised apart. He is professor emeritus of psychology and director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota. Bouchard received his PhD from the University of California,Berkeley,in 1966.
Delbert Duane Thiessen is an American psychology professor emeritus whose research focused on evolutionary mechanisms of reproduction and social communication.
Sandra Wood Scarr was an American psychologist and writer. She was the first female full professor in psychology in the history of Yale University. She established core resources for the study of development,including the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study and the Minnesota Adolescent Adoption Study. She served as president of multiple societies including the Association for Psychological Science and was honored with multiple awards including the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award. She was also active in the development of commercial childcare. Her work with twins in the 1960s revealed strong genetic influences on intellectual development. One of her key findings was that this differed with race and socioeconomic status (SES),with poor and non-white children showing less genetic influence on their IQ and more environmental influence. She demonstrated a successful intervention in premature infants,showing that stimulation improved their health and developmental outcomes.
The Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research is a series of behavioral genetic longitudinal studies of families with twin or adoptive offspring conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota. It seeks to identify and characterize the genetic and environmental influences on the development of psychological traits.
Leda Cosmides is an American psychologist,who,together with anthropologist husband John Tooby,pioneered the field of evolutionary psychology.
Personality development encompasses the dynamic construction and deconstruction of integrative characteristics that distinguish an individual in terms of interpersonal behavioral traits. Personality development is ever-changing and subject to contextual factors and life-altering experiences. Personality development is also dimensional in description and subjective in nature. That is,personality development can be seen as a continuum varying in degrees of intensity and change. It is subjective in nature because its conceptualization is rooted in social norms of expected behavior,self-expression,and personal growth. The dominant viewpoint in personality psychology indicates that personality emerges early and continues to develop across one's lifespan. Adult personality traits are believed to have a basis in infant temperament,meaning that individual differences in disposition and behavior appear early in life,potentially before language of conscious self-representation develop. The Five Factor Model of personality maps onto the dimensions of childhood temperament. This suggests that individual differences in levels of the corresponding personality traits are present from young ages.
Robert Joseph Plomin is an American/British psychologist and geneticist best known for his work in twin studies and behavior genetics. A Review of General Psychology survey,published in 2002,ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology.
Martha Kent McClintock is an American psychologist best known for her research on human pheromones and her theory of menstrual synchrony.
Irving Isadore Gottesman was an American professor of psychology who devoted most of his career to the study of the genetics of schizophrenia. He wrote 17 books and more than 290 other publications,mostly on schizophrenia and behavioral genetics,and created the first academic program on behavioral genetics in the United States. He won awards such as the Hofheimer Prize for Research,the highest award from the American Psychiatric Association for psychiatric research. Lastly,Gottesman was a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota,where he received his Ph.D.
Dorret I. Boomsma is a Dutch biological psychologist specializing in genetics and twin studies.
Behavioural genetics,also referred to as behaviour genetics,is a field of scientific research that uses genetic methods to investigate the nature and origins of individual differences in behaviour. While the name "behavioural genetics" connotes a focus on genetic influences,the field broadly investigates the extent to which genetic and environmental factors influence individual differences,and the development of research designs that can remove the confounding of genes and environment. Behavioural genetics was founded as a scientific discipline by Francis Galton in the late 19th century,only to be discredited through association with eugenics movements before and during World War II. In the latter half of the 20th century,the field saw renewed prominence with research on inheritance of behaviour and mental illness in humans,as well as research on genetically informative model organisms through selective breeding and crosses. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries,technological advances in molecular genetics made it possible to measure and modify the genome directly. This led to major advances in model organism research and in human studies,leading to new scientific discoveries.
Psychology encompasses a vast domain,and includes many different approaches to the study of mental processes and behavior. Below are the major areas of inquiry that taken together constitute psychology. A comprehensive list of the sub-fields and areas within psychology can be found at the list of psychology topics and list of psychology disciplines.
Aurelio JoséFigueredo is an American evolutionary psychologist. He is a professor of psychology,Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona,where he is also the director of the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory. He is also a member of the interdisciplinary Center for Insect Science at the University of Arizona. His major areas of research interest are the evolutionary psychology and behavioral development of life history strategy,cognition,sex,and violence in human and nonhuman animals,and the quantitative ethology and social development of insects,birds,and primates. He is known for his research on personality,such as a 1997 study in which he and James E. King developed the Chimpanzee Personality Questionnaire to measure the Big Five personality traits in chimpanzees.
Jenae M. Neiderhiser is an American behavior geneticist who is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Human Development and Family Studies at Pennsylvania State University,where she is also co-director of the Gene Environment Research Initiative.
Wendy Johnson is an American differential psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She holds the chair in Differential Development in the Department of Psychology and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.
Richard J. Rose is an American psychologist and behavioral geneticist. He is Emeritus Professor of Psychological &Brain Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and of Medical &Molecular Genetics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1964,where he was advised by David T. Lykken. A founding member of the Behavior Genetics Association,he served as its president in 1999 and received its Dobzhansky Award in 2007. He is known for his research using twins to study human behavioral traits such as alcoholism and IQ. This included working as a consultant on the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart in the 1970s. He began collaborating with scientists at the University of Helsinki in 1984,and received an honorary doctorate from this university in 2009.
Daniel G. Freedman was an American psychologist and Professor in Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago,who pioneered the use of biological and evolutionary viewpoints to understand differences of human behavior. His studies of behavioral differences in dogs and human infants were ground-breaking.
