Psychology

There are many different studies that support Nature, Nurture, or both. The is such a complex interaction between nature and nurture, environment and genetics, that is will never be clear as to which concept has the highest influence over us.

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Human development can be largely influenced by the environment you grew up in. Having a happy childhood and growing up in a positive and nurturing environment is fundamental in our development.

An example showing how both nature and nurture determines who you are, is by looking at the article, Born to Kill, written in 2003, where Kathleen Folbigg was charged with the murder of her four children that spanned a decade. Her father was a murderer and her mother abandoned her. She grew up in a supposedly positive and caring foster family and learned about her parents when she became an adult. As she wrote in her journal about being her father's daughter, it is obvious that she role modelled her father. It is speculated that if she never learnt about her birth parents, she may not have killed her children. It is believed Folbigg had mutated genes that altered her behaviour. This would have come into effect because of nurture. If Nature had a 100% influence over us, people could easily blame their genes for killing people, raising the debate as to whether we can blame our genes on our actions.

There is also the concept of nature VIA nurture. That nurture is stimulated by nature's features, that these two concepts are closely linked. So whilst you are born with certain characteristics, the development of them is because of nurture; environmental factors.

Another example of how Nature and Nurture interact with each other is Language. We are born with the ability to learn language, which is nature, however we are not born with the capability to speak it and we learn to speak the language through nurture.

Nurture is the environment we are brought up in and what we are surrounded by and experience. Our knowledge and experience is learnt through our environment, how our parents raised us, our culture, social and financial status and background.

It is hard to prove that nature is the dominant factor in the influence on our behaviour, as it is impossible to rule out any environmental experiences since birth.

Nature or Nurture? Scientists have discussed this issue for centuries. Is our personality influenced by our genes or the environment around us? What causes our behaviour? Our likes and dislikes? Which has the biggest influence? My opinion is that Nature and Nurture each have a 50% influence and effect on our personality and behaviour.

People who stand behind Nature believe that we are born with our personality and behavioural traits. They are caused because of our genes and remain the same, irrespective of where you were born and how you were raised.

A question that seemed to make its way into the nature-nurture debate is whether intelligence is caused by nature or nurture. Identical twins have exactly the same genetic makeup, whereas fraternal twins do not. If the IQ correlations between Identical twins were higher than those between fraternal, this is strong evidence that intelligence is partly inherited. Bouchard and McGue (1981) reviewed 111 studies to investigate this. Their finding showed that identical twins obtained higher correlations. Identical twins raised together had even higher IQ statistics, compared to that of identical twins reared apart; thus supporting the influence of nature/ genetics/ on a person's intelligence.

Twins Early Development Study at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry studied data from more than 6700 families relating to 45 childhood characteristics, from IQ to hyperactivity. They found that genetic and environmental contributions to these characteristics vary geographically in the UK and that genetics does not necessarily map out our traits.