Posted: April 13th, 2023

Heredity: Nature Versus Nurture and Development

Does heredity affect your personality, or is it your environment. Many psychologists have been back and forth on this question for years. Both of them can affect your behavior and development, but which one affects it the most? Heredity and environment are both leading causes of how a human being acts, and functions. From the heredity standpoint, however, it is proven that heredity does play a part in a person’s development and behavior.
In a twin study, they proved that identical (monozygotic) children have more similarities living together and being separated and living with two different families than the fraternal (dizygotic) twins that are raised together in the same home. Having the same genes that your parents have, such as: eye color, skin color, and hair color somehow means that you have a partial genetic makeup as your parent, which could mean that you could also inherit their development and behavior. From an environmental standpoint, they also make a logical point.
Effects of early nutrition and toxic substances can also affect a person’s development and behavior. Many things can affect your behavior and development. It really just depends on what you believe or if you believe both. There are certain traits that a person has that is either considered physical or behavioral characteristics. To pick three behavioral traits for me personally, I would pick warmth, reasoning, and self-reliance. Warmth being affection or kindness, I believe that it was caused by my environment. My family, and close friends all have a “warm” side.

I was always surrounded by generous people that always showed affection. Reasoning: finding an answer using various possibilities. Instead of being stubborn, I like to look at different problems in a different point of view. This trait is most likely a trait that I received through my environment, also. Self-reliance, I would most definitely say was inherited through my environment because of the things that I saw as a child. I watched my cousins rely on other people besides themselves and they are not doing well at all because of the mistake that they made to rely on someone else, rather than doing it themselves.
Psychical characteristics, such as: thin hair, blue eyes, and the shape of my feet are all caused by my families heredity. My feet look identical to my fathers, I get my blue eyes from my father, and my hair being as thin as it is I get from my mother. There are certain traits affect development and behavior. Heredity and environment playing major roles. I believe that nurture has more to do with your behavior and development than nature does. Yes, you do receive traits from your parents such as psychical traits but, I believe that your environment determines our development and behavior.
Effects of early nutrition (Ricciuti, 1993; S. A. Rose, 1994; Sigman & Whaley, 1998) concluded that malnutrition to an infant can cause a child to have limited neurological development and have long term impact on cognitive development. Another research study, Effects of Toxic Substances can also affect your development and behavior. (Dorris, 1989) concluded that Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, where mothers consumed large amounts of alcohol during their pregnancy had children that lack motor coordination, delayed language, and mental retardation.
Effects of the home environment (Bradley & Caldwell, 1984; Brooks-Gunn et al. , 1996; McGowan & Johnson, 1984) has plenty to do with development and behavior. Children that are raised around parents that do not care about what their children are doing, and how they are doing with school will most likely end up with bad behavior, and suffering consequences with the law or a higher power because of how they were raised and treated as children.
A more stimulating home environment, where there are activities to keep the children busy, the parents are interacting with the children, and there are activities to keep their brain stimulated are shown to have children with higher IQ scores than the children with less of a stimulating environment that has to entertain themselves. It all comes down to what your actually believe. Heredity and environment both play roles in determining development and behavior issues.
You can get your skin color from your dad being a cause of heredity, and your clothing style from the environment you were raised around. The nature vs nurture debate will never come to a full conclusion because of everyone that has totally different perspectives of the issues. This is just a situation where you have to view both sides of the argument and decide which side of the argument you favor the most, or do you believe that both nature and nurture play equal roles in a humans behavior and development.

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