PSYC 317 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Gut Flora, Psychiatric Genetics, Intron
15 Jun 2016
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Document Summary
A gene does not produce a behavior or an emotion. Proteins only produce tendencies to respond to the environment in certain ways. Anxiety: the brain chemicals and genes relevant to anxiety don"t make you anxious. They make you more responsive to anxiety-provoking situations, make it harder to detect safety signals. Depression: brain chemicals make you more vulnerable to stressors in the environment, to deciding that you are helpless even when you"re not. The biological factors that genes code for in the nervous system typically don"t determine behavior. Instead they affect how you respond to often very subtle influences in the environment. There are genetic vulnerabilities, tendencies, predispositions--but rarely genetic inevitabilities. Genetic transcription are regulated by non-coding regions: genes must obey other factors that regulate when and how they function, very often, those factors are environmental. Regulatory elements introduce the possibility of environmentally modulated if-then clauses.
