Child psychology is very complicated because the environment always has a role In the question of nature vs nurture it s pretty much always both The focus of this course is on how genes and environment interact with each other John B Watson declared that with the right environment a child could be turned into pretty much anything John Locke called this tabula rasa meaning blank slate And as Watson demonstrated with his Little Albert experiment you can condition the baby to feel lots of emotions This idea tabula rasa that behavior is rooted entirely in the environment is the main thesis of the learning perspective whereas the biological perspective states that some behavior is rooted in the genetics of a person For a counterexample to the learning perspective Little Albert could be conditioned to fear white rats but not white rabbits This means that bad behavior could be blamed on bad genes in the parents Gesell s Maturational Theory says that behavior is more predetermined Basically kids are different from the start The biological perspective is flawed because it leads to elitist eugenics or outright racist lines of thought The learning perspective is flawed because some of us have certain inborn instinctual behaviors Basically there is no nurture vs nature debate It is a false dichotomy Both exist together and both influence each other At a microscopic level inside the nucleus of each human cell there are 23 pairs of chromosomes These chromosomes consist of DNA and sections of DNA contain genes which are the codes that determine things like hair color eye color etc Not everything that is coded happens Genotype what the DNA codes Phenotype what actually happens both physically and psychologically Dominant genes are stronger than recessive genes meaning that if both are in DNA the dominant genes emerge This often explains the disconnect between genotype and phenotype Most diseases are recessive except for Huntington s Interestingly sometimes a resistance to a disease is also recessive Sickle Cell Trait is the recessive sickle cell that provides resistance to Malaria Heterozygous if you have one dominant one recessive Homozygous recessive if you have two recessive Homozygous dominant if you have two dominant Behavioral Genetics is the branch of genetics that deals with the inheritance of behavioral and psychological traits It is all incredibly complicated Most traits are polygenic meaning they are the result of many genes have environmental interaction Reaction range refers to the range of possible outcomes in a population due to a subtle genetic shift Individual traits usually occur in a normal bell shaped curve We ve been messing with genes via selective breeding picking who mates with who Genetic diversity is important so we don t overemphasize certain traits over others and we keep traits in that bell curve Characteristics most affected by heredity Intelligence Psychological Disorders Personality Traits There are two main kinds of genetic disorders Inherited Disorders sickle cell disease Cystic fibrosis Tay Sachs Huntington s Abnormal Chromosomes when meiosis goes wrong and it leads to wrong chromosomes like Down Syndrome The first way genes affect behavior is via passive gene environment interaction Parents provide gene and environment The second way is via evocative gene environment interaction where genes influence behavior which evokes an environmental reaction The third way is via active gene environment interaction where genes drive the individual to new and exciting environments This is called niche picking We use twin and adoption studies to tackle the nature vs nurture argument because identical twins have 100 of the same genes but they might be given up for adoption and raised in different environments There are two kinds of twins monozygotic identical one egg and dizygotic fraternal two eggs We are generally referring to monozygotic The problem with these studies is that we never know whether someone behaved because of their genes or in spite of their genes Besides twin adoption studies we can use DNA markers to examine specific alleles and do genetic testing We can look at what genes correspond with what diseases Williams syndrome seems to correlate with chromosome 7 for example During meiosis the process that creates sperms and eggs these genetic diseases arise from spontaneous mutations Unfortunately behavioral traits cannot be so easily linked to personality often because of the gene environment interactions above Genes might just create something else that leads to those things for example people with symmetrical faces tend to be more popular There are a few ethics to follow We want the assent of the child While children cannot get the exact comprehension of the experiment we want their agreement nonetheless a For children that are too young we often need their parents around to calm them down and get the kids to have fun and enjoy themselves This can curve generalizability unfortunately As a result we also get the informed consent of the parents we need to tell them exactly what is going on and we need them to agree We have to make sure what we are doing does more good than harm the hippocratic oath Finally we need explicit permission from the parents and children to show their data For all of these reasons and more there are some studies we simply cannot do because of the ethics they would violate All good studies start with correlations We often develop a hypothesis for the purpose of experiments by first observing and make correlation