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Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting of another, usually a child, from that person's biological or legal parent or parents. Legal adoptions permanently transfer all rights and responsibilities, along with filiation, from the biological parents to the adoptive parents.
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.
Richard D. Arvey is an American psychology professor.
In psychology, a trait is called emergenic if it is the result of a specific combination of several interacting genes. Emergenic traits will not run in families, but identical twins will share them. Traits such as "leadership", "genius" or certain mental illnesses may be emergenic. Although one may expect epigenetics to play a significant role in the phenotypic manifestation of twins reared apart, the concordance displayed between them can be attributed to emergenesis.
Research on the heritability of IQ inquires into the degree of variation in IQ within a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population. There has been significant controversy in the academic community about the heritability of IQ since research on the issue began in the late nineteenth century. Intelligence in the normal range is a polygenic trait, meaning that it is influenced by more than one gene, and in the case of intelligence at least 500 genes. Further, explaining the similarity in IQ of closely related persons requires careful study because environmental factors may be correlated with genetic factors.
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.
The field of psychology has been greatly influenced by the study of genetics. Decades of research have demonstrated that both genetic and environmental factors play a role in a variety of behaviors in humans and animals. The genetic basis of aggression, however, remains poorly understood. Aggression is a multi-dimensional concept, but it can be generally defined as behavior that inflicts pain or harm on another.
Nancy L. Segal is an American evolutionary psychologist and behavioral geneticist, specializing in the study of twins. She is the Professor of Developmental Psychology and Director of the Twin Studies Center, at California State University, Fullerton. Segal was a recipient of the 2005 James Shields Award for Lifetime Contributions to Twin Research from the Behavior Genetics Association and International Society for Twin Studies.
Gene–environment correlation is said to occur when exposure to environmental conditions depends on an individual's genotype.
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.
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.
A twin registry is a database of information about both identical twins and fraternal twins, which is often maintained by an academic institution, such as a university, or by other research institutions.
Adoption studies typically compare pairs of persons, e.g., adopted child and adoptive mother or adopted child and biological mother, to assess genetic and environmental influences on behavior. These studies are one of the classic research methods of behavioral genetics. The method is used alongside twin studies to identify the roles of genetics and environmental variables that impact intelligence, and behavioral disorders.
Robert Frank Krueger is Hathaway Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology and Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He is known for his research on personality psychology, clinical psychology, quantitative psychology, developmental psychology, personality disorders, behavioral genetics, and psychopathology. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Personality Disorders.
William George Iacono is an American psychologist known for his research in behavior genetics. He uses methodologies such as twin and adoption studies, to study the development of common mental disorders and substance abuse.
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.
The Swedish Twin Registry is a twin registry based at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Originally established in the 1960s, it is the largest twin registry in the world. It is widely used for medical research, with about thirty active research projects using data from the study as of 2019. As of 2012, it contained a total of 194,000 twins, 75,000 of whom were of a known zygosity. In principle, it contains records of every twin born in Sweden since 1886.
References
- 1 2 3 4 Wilson, Sylia; Haroian, Kevin; Iacono, William G.; Krueger, Robert F.; Lee, James J.; Luciana, Monica; Malone, Stephen M.; McGue, Matt; Roisman, Glenn I.; Vrieze, Scott (2019). "Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research". Twin Research and Human Genetics. 22 (6): 746–752. doi:10.1017/thg.2019.107. ISSN 1832-4274. PMC 7056536 . PMID 31796137.
- ↑ Krueger, Robert F.; Johnson, Wendy (1 October 2002). "The Minnesota Twin Registry: Current Status and Future Directions". Twin Research. 5 (5): 488–492. doi: 10.1375/136905202320906336 . PMID 12537882.
- ↑ Bouchard, Thomas J. Jr.; Lykken, David T.; McGue, Matthew; Segal, Nancy L.; Tellegen, Auke (1990). "Sources of human psychological differences: the Minnesota study of twins reared apart" (PDF). Science. 250 (4978): 223–8. Bibcode:1990Sci...250..223B. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.225.1769 . doi:10.1126/science.2218526. PMID 2218526. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-02-27.
- ↑ Allen, Arthur (1998-01-11). "Nature & Nurture: When It Comes to Twins, Sometimes It's Hard To Tell the Two Apart". The Washington Post. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
- ↑ The Psychology of Adoption
- ↑ Depression: Theories and Treatments: Psychological, Biological, and Social
- ↑ Segal, Nancy L. (2012). Born Together – Reared Apart. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-05546-9.
- Bryan Caplan (June 20, 2012). "O Brother, Who Art Thou?". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 2017-12-28.