Nature vs nurture

Question 1

Nature

Answer 1

The belief that behaviour is a product of inherited, innate factors.

Question 2

Heredity

Answer 2

The process by which traits are passed from parents to their offspring, referring to genetic inheritance.

Question 3

Nurture

Answer 3

The belief that behaviour is a product of environmental influences.

Question 4

Environment

Answer 4

Refers to all influences that are outside of the human body, which includes people, events, the physical world and cultural and historical influences.

Question 5

Interactionist

Answer 5

The view that the processes of nature and nurture work together rather than in opposition to each other.

Question 6

Nature

Answer 6

Refers to pre-writing and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other internal factors.

Question 7

Nurture

Answer 7

Generally taken as the influence of external factors in our environment, e.g life experiences and learning on an individual.

Question 8

Interactionism

Answer 8

Instead of defending extreme nature or nurture view, most psychological researchers are now interested in investigating how nature and nurture interact in a host of qualitatively different ways and finding a middle ground.

Question 9

Behavioural genetics

Answer 9

Has enabled psychology to quantify the relative contribution of nature and nurture regarding specific psychological traits.

Question 10

Approaches

Answer 10

Nature Biological
Psychodynamic
Interactionist Cognitive
Humanistic
Nurture Behaviourist

Question 11

Niche picking

Answer 11

A psychological theory that people choose environments that compliment their heredity. As children grow older they seek out experiences and environments that suit their genes.
For example, extroverts may choose to go the the pub or clubs.

Question 12

Epigenetics

Answer 12

•How the life experience of previous generations can affect our genetic codes
•Your behaviours and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work, without involving alterations to the DNA sequence itself
•Instead, these changes affect how genes are read and tell our bodies which genes to use and which to ignore
•This will influence the genetic codes of your children, and then their children and so on

Question 13

Research support for epigenetics

Answer 13

Dias and Ressker performed a groundbreaking experiment. They taught male mice to fear the smell of acetophenone by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been exposed to the smell yet naturally having a fear of it. So did the rat’s grandchildren.
However, this study uses rats, humans may have more complex gene-environment relationships, so the results can’t be fully generalised to humans.