Nature and Nurture in Development

11 Key excerpts on "Nature and Nurture in Development"

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  21st Century Psychology: A Reference Handbook

  • Stephen F. Davis, William Buskist, Stephen F. Davis, William F. Buskist(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Furthermore, policy makers must remember that science (including psychology) is a field of study that attempts to provide more and more accurate knowledge over time. So, current conclusions regarding the influence of nature and nurture will change over time as our knowledge gets better. This means that applications should also be changed as scientific knowledge improves; hence, policy makers need to remain knowledgeable concerning the constantly changing conclusions in the nature versus nurture debate. 78 • DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY SUMMARY The nature versus nurture debate has a long history in Western philosophy and modern psychology. The debate is relevant to many different areas of study in psychol-ogy, including intelligence, giftedness, sexual orientation, personality, and mental illness. Today, most psychologists take an interactionist approach that views both nature and nurture as being important in development. However, some researchers still emphasize either nature or nurture as being the key component that determines a psychological trait. Many psychological researchers will continue to use tried-and-true research methods such as twin and adoption studies to examine the nature/nurture issue; however, future genetic research will identify more genes that influence behavioral and psychological phenomena. Future research on environ-mental factors will focus on the importance of nonshared environments and how different children in the same family might experience the same environmental stimulus in dif-ferent ways, thus having a very different influence on their development. Research findings regarding nature and nur-ture will continue to be among the most applicable aspects of psychological studies, but they will likely also remain among the most politically volatile issues in the field. REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS Burdon, R. H. (1999). Genes and environment . Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis.

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  AAP Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics

  • AAP Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Robert G. Voigt, Robert G. Voigt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • American Academy of Pediatrics

    (Publisher)

  5 Nature, Nurture, and Their Interactions in Child Development and Behavior Paul Wang, MD, FAAP 5 Nature and nurture have long been regarded as rival influences on child development and behavior. One school of thought has contended that a child’s behaviors and devel- opmental outcome are determined by nature—that is, by innate biology—while a rival school has argued that nurture—a child’s environment and experiences—is dominant in determining the child’s developmental outcome. While the nature-nurture debate raged among academics, intuitive parents and primary pediatric health care professionals have long known that both sets of factors—the innate and the experiential—are important in the complex processes of child development and behavior. Over the last several decades, science has amassed substantial evidence to document the importance of both nature and nurture. 1 Moreover, current research is elucidating the complex ways in which nature and nurture interact throughout the childhood years. This chapter attempts to provide a framework in which to consider how nature, nurture, and their interactions shape children’s lives. Many examples are provided of both innate and experiential factors that influence children’s development and behavior, and of the mechanisms through which those factors are believed to act. Throughout the chapter, the reader is asked to hold 2 overarching concepts in mind: individual variability and devel-opmental plasticity. Because of individual variability, children differ in how any factor may shape their development and behavior regardless of whether that factor is innate or environmental. As research is beginning to show, much of this variability may be rooted in the interaction of nature and nurture, also known as gene by environment interaction or GxE. Because of developmental plasticity, the effects of both innate and experiential factors can be either augmented or ameliorated by other factors over time.

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  Issues, Debates and Approaches in Psychology

  • Ian Fairholm(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The term nurture used to refer specifically to the type and quality of care the child received from its parents (particularly the mother) and how important this care was in the development of a particular psychological trait, but more recently the meaning of the term has been greatly expanded. It now tends to refer to any environmental (and therefore non-genetic) factor, which obviously includes parental influence but also incorporates stimuli that offspring can experience or be affected by whilst in the mother’s womb, plus the impact of extended family members and peers, and influences from the media, schooling and socio-economic status throughout life.

  Now you may be thinking, surely most psychological traits are influenced to some extent by elements of both nature and nurture? Of course you’d be right and this is a point I will be expanding upon throughout the chapter. There are reasons why distinctions are often made between nature and nurture when talking about this issue, implying that it’s a case of either one or the other. The main reason is a historical one and it relates back to a point I made in the opening chapter: that debates are often defined by their extreme positions.

  For much of the twentieth century this debate tended to be dominated by psychologists who favoured one side almost exclusively over the other, though it’s probably fair to say that most psychologists actually tended to occupy a position somewhere in between those two extremes. In the last couple of decades progress has slowly been made, in terms of the science used to study the contributions of nature and nurture and also in terms of encouraging both sides to consider if some form of synthesis might be possible. The idea that there is some degree of interaction between nature and nurture is becoming increasingly common, though the debate is now moving towards questions about the precise relationship between the two interacting forces for different psychological variables. Not surprisingly, psychologists who argue that aspects of nature and nurture interact in determining mental capacities and behaviour are referred to as adopting an interactionist position within this debate.

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  Early Childhood and Neuroscience

  Theory, Research and Implications for Practice

  • Mine Conkbayir(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Beyond Nature versus Nurture 99 What is the nature versus nurture debate? The answers to the mystery of human development in relation to the nature versus nurture debate vary enormously and depend on a range of influ -ences. Nativists (supporters of the nature side of the argument) believe that aspects of human development such as intelligence and personality are determined by genetic make-up. Empiricists (supporters of the nurture side of the argument), however, believe that these are acquired (i.e. learned). Empiricists such as John Locke popularized the Latin phrase tabula rasa (meaning ‘blank slate’), conveying the idea that the child’s mind is a blank canvas on which the adult can inscribe knowledge and experience. Noam Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (1965) is just one example of the nativist perspective of human development. He believed that the ability to understand and reproduce language was innate in all humans due to an existing mental capacity and the requisite vocal mechanisms. Theoretically, this of course makes perfect sense: a baby observes her parent and upon babbling or cooing back, they praise her and engage with her to further encourage her communication, and so the proto-conversations develop. Pause for thought 1 Why do you think the nature versus nurture debate is part of the early childhood discourse? 2 Some people believe that the prenatal environment is nature, while others view it as nurture. What do you think and why? 3a Do you think that characteristics are mainly determined by nature or nurture? 3b Do you think it is possible to answer this question definitively? Explain the reason for your answer. 4 Do you think it is important to distinguish whether characteristics are determined by nature or nurture? Please explain your answer. Some people put pre-natal environment in nature but others count that as nurture.

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  Concepts and Theories of Human Development

  • Richard M. Lerner(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This issue pertains to the source of human behavior and development. Simply, a question is raised about where behavior and development come from. In its most extreme form the issue pertains to whether behavior and development derive from nature (or in modern terms, heredity, maturation, or genes) or, at the other extreme, whether behavior and development derive from nurture (or in more modern terms, environment, experience, or learning). However, whatever terms are used, the issue raises questions about how inborn, intrinsic, native, or in short, nature characteristics (for example, genes) may contribute to development and/or, in turn, how acquired, socialized, environmental, experienced, or in short, nurture characteristics (for example, stimulus–response connections, education, or socialization) may play a role in development. Table 3.1 lists some terms used in regard to nature and nurture contributions, respectively. The separation, or split, between nature and nurture illustrated in the table reflects a key distinction made by philosophers and scientists about the bases of human development. The separation between nature and nurture is an exemplar of the tendency in modern thought about human development to approach the study of people with concepts that reflect conceptual “splits.” That is, realities about development are discussed or debated in either-or terms. I noted in Chapters 1 and 2 that such bifurcation of concepts of development can be traced in modern philosophy at least to the ideas of the seventeenth-century philosopher, René Descartes. The study of human development has been a field wherein fundamental conceptual issues have been framed traditionally as Cartesian splits (Overton, 2015a)

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  Cognitive Gadgets

  The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

  • Cecilia Heyes(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  T H E D E V E L O P M E N T O F E V E R Y A S P E C T O F H U M A N behavior and cognition depends on a rich, turbulent stew of factors. Even the development of something as simple as fight-or- flight reactions to threatening stimuli depends on complex, looping interactions between a multitude of DNA sequences (genes), epige-netic markers, environmental inputs (such as threat stimuli, pa-rental care, nutrition), and the current state of the neuroendocrine system that these resources have conspired to produce (Loman and Gunnar, 2010). The rich interactive complexity of developmental processes makes it absolutely clear that, in cognition as in other bio-logical systems, there are no pure cases of nature or of nurture; no biological characteristic is caused only by “the genes” or only by “the environment.” The absence of pure cases has led some people to conclude that the nature-nurture debate should be abandoned, but this simply does not follow. The composition of a cake never depends solely on the in-gredients, nor solely on oven settings, but it still makes sense to ask 2 N AT U R E , N U R T U R E , C U LT U R E Nature, Nurture, Culture 25 to what extent, and in what ways, the various ingredients and oven set-tings contribute to the cake’s appearance, flavor, and texture. Simi-larly, although every biological characteristic is the product of nature and nurture, it remains coherent and important to ask, for any particular characteristic, to what extent and in what ways nature and nurture contribute to its development. Indeed, answering these questions is, arguably, one of the core tasks of developmental biology and developmental psychology. Nonetheless, those who are skeptical about contrasting nature with nurture, and innate with acquired characteristics, have empha-sized two genuine and complementary dangers. On the one hand, ef-forts to explain development run the risk of being overwhelmed by the sheer multifactorial complexity of developmental systems.

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  Psychology

  Modules for Active Learning

  • Dennis Coon, John Mitterer, Tanya Martini, , Dennis Coon, John Mitterer, Tanya Martini, (Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  95 It’s a Boy! With those words, Gloria first glimpsed her amazing newborn baby, Joseph. Like parents everywhere, Gloria and her husband, Jay, wondered: How will Joseph’s life unfold? What kind of a person will he be? Will he be a happy teenager, marry, become a father, find an interesting career, live a full and satisfying life? Research tells a fascinating story about human growth and de-velopment, from birth and infancy to maturing, aging, and death. Understanding your development might well help you answer two important questions: “How did I become the person I am today?” and “Who will I become tomorrow?” Like Joseph, our heredity and our environment will influence every stage of our lives. How does our genetic inheritance combine Human Development Heredity and Environment MODULE 12 Maria Svetlychnaja/Shutterstock.com After reading this module you should be able to: 12.1 Explain how heredity (nature) and environment (nurture) interact to shape human development. Be able to give examples from infant motor and sensory development ~LEARNING OUTCOMES~ Nature and Nurture—It Takes Two to Tango Learning Outcome 12.1 Explain how heredity (nature) and environments (nurture) interact to shape human devel-opment. Be able to give examples from infant motor and sensory development When we think of human development, we naturally think of children growing up into adults. But even as adults, we never really stop growing. Developmental psychology , the study of normal changes in behavior that occur across the life span, involves every stage of life from conception to death, or womb to tomb (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2019; Newman & Newman, 2018). Heredity (our “nature”) and environ-ment (our “nurture”) also affect us throughout our lifetimes. Which is more important, heredity or environment ? Neither. Biopsychologist Donald Hebb once offered a use-ful analogy: What is more important to define the area of a rectangle, height or width? Of course, both are essential.

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  Social and Emotional Development in Infancy and Early Childhood

  • Janette B. Benson, Marshall M. Haith(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  It was not until 251 the mid-1900s, however, that the field of psychology as a whole began to consider the importance of genetic factors. Based on a number of influential animal studies of learning and twin and adoption studies of behavior, the field of psychology gradually accepted that genetic factors were important for psychological traits. The recognition of the role of genetics by the field of psychology can now be seen by the number of psychologists conducting research on the influence of genetic factors and the number of genetics papers that are published in psychology journals. Most psychologists, thus, currently accept the importance of both genetic and environmental factors. Yet, many researchers continue to ask whether genetic or envir-onmental factors are more important, which is the very premise of the nature vs. nurture debate. This article provides a brief description of a number of topics related to genetics and psychology in order to facilitate a greater understanding of the nature vs. nurture debate. First, the article describes the types of psychological traits and behaviors that are studied by the field of behavior genetics, the controversial field that explores genetic and environmental influences on behavior. Second, the text will include a brief review of human genetics to provide the necessary background for the discussion of the nature vs. nurture debate. Third, it will explain the types of environ-mental influences that need to be considered when review-ing behavior genetic findings. Fourth, the article will go on to provide an overview of the basic behavior genetic findings that are relevant to psychological traits. Fifth, the importance of the interplay of genetic and environmen-tal factors will be emphasized. Sixth, an overview of the research methods behavior geneticists use to simulta-neously study environmental and genetic factors will be included.

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  The Nature of Nurture

  • Theodore D. Wachs(Author)
  • 1992(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  9 The Nature of Nurture Implications and Applications 11 terms of our understanding of both the struc-Lture of the environment and the processes under-lying environmental influences upon behavior and development, w e appear to have come a long w a y from Phase I studies on the environment. A summary of the major points contained in this volume will illustrate not only how far w e have come but also where w e need to go. The Nature of Nurture To understand the role of environmental influences, it is critical to understand that the environment operates as part of a more general system (for purposes of this chapter I am defining a system as a set of variables that have the potential to influence develop-ment, and that are organized within a conceptually meaningful framework; Wachs, 1991d). This more general system encom-passes hierarchically organized multiple environmental compo-nents, nonenvironmental individual characteristics, and bioso-140 141 Implications and Applications cial-biobehavioral parameters. While w e traditionally refer to the environment, a more appropriate label to use when discussing the nature of nurture would be the environmental system. Structurally the environmental system encompasses multiple levels. Higher levels of the environmental system can influence both the nature and the impact of the environmental system at lower levels. The direction of influences within the environmental system, however, is not necessarily from higher to lower levels. The environmental system is potentially bidirectional, both within and across levels. The environmental system functions not only in space but also in time. Thus there appear to be age periods when the individual is more sensitive to specific environmental influences than at ear-lier or later times.

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  An Introduction to Genetics for Language Scientists

  Current Concepts, Methods, and Findings

  • Dan Dediu(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Nature, nurture, and heritability In this chapter we approach, at a fairly abstract level, the fundamental questions concerning the relationships between the phenotype (the observable properties of individuals), the genotype and the environment. We discuss the paramount impor- tance of variation in studying these relationships and we define, estimate and discuss the meanings and misinterpretations of heritability. Far from being a simple concept, heritability will turn out to have some non-intuitive properties that make the interpretation of heritability estimates quite a tricky exercise. Likewise, we will discover that, in fact, all the related concepts and distinctions, such as innate and acquired, or nature and nurture, are fuzzy and far from their apparent clarity in every- day discourse. We will end with a very brief survey of heritability studies in speech and language. This chapter also introduces several fundamental concepts of statistics that are necessary for a proper understanding of many topics covered in this book. 2.1 Phenotype, genotype and environment It is unquestionable that both “nature” and “nurture” are required for the development of a linguistic human being. Lacking “nature” will limit lan- guage development no matter how much “nurture” there might be, as many a pet owner can easily confirm. This is seemingly supported by studies of chimps (such as Nim Chimpsky and Washoe) reared in conditions similar to those experienced by human babies and infants, but which nevertheless fail to go beyond a rather limited level of language usage. On the other hand, having “nature” but lacking “nurture” is equally devastating, as shown by the cases of children who, for various reasons, have not been exposed to language during the so-called critical period for language acquisition (a well- known case being Genie) and who fail to develop full-blown language despite considerable efforts. 7

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  Models of Man

  Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action

  • Martin Hollis(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, the question as to whether the nature of the causal bond excludes all chance is not thereby settled. (The Rules, Chapter 5.) We now have the makings of a standard debate. Homo sociologicus and homo psychologicus are both plastic creatures, in the sense that their behav- iour is the product of antecedent factors which operate in a law-like way. The point of debate is whether the key factors are social or psychological. In either case, there is no threat to freedom but it is for debate whether an assumption of determinism leaves the old teaser open or settles it by reconciliation. Science is agreed to be a search for causal laws but the nature of the causal bond is for debate. I shall take up these points here and in the next chapter. But, since they are familiar fare, I shall stress what I think crucial about them, that they beg the most basic questions of human nature and scientific explanation. Asked to choose between nature and nurture, we are no doubt inclined to have both. But the crucial point is that we are entitled to say, ‘Neither’. 20 nature and nurture To conduct a cosy dispute between nature and nurture, we set out for a compromise by driving the extremes together. How does homo psychologi- cus account for the different forms which an allegedly uniform human nature takes in different places and times? Variety and development surely depend on externals. Natural environment no doubt plays a part – life in a desert full of oil differs from life in a tundra full of bears. But there is surely a social factor too – ‘the actual behaviour of individuals towards one another is unintelligible unless one views their behaviour in terms of their status and roles, and the concepts of status and role are devoid of meaning unless one interprets them in terms of the organisation to which the individuals belong’.

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