PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Heritability, Human Behaviour, Foxp2

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

Evolutionary psychology- evolutionary psychology is concerned with the evolutionary underpinnings of behaviour - understanding the adaptive significance and utility of behaviours exhibited by modern humans. Human nature- range of human behaviours that differentiate mankind from other species, made up of adaptations, which are all behavioural characteristics that are the product of natural selection in ancestral environments. Heritability- amount of variability in a given trait in a given population at a given time due to genetic factors. Misunderstandings about heritability: heritability is a population measure; it tells us nothing about any specific individual. A heritability of . 40 indicates that, on average, about 40% of the individual differences that we observe in, say, extroversion may be in some way attributable to genetic individual difference. It does not mean that 40% of any person"s extroversion is a result of his/her genes and the other 60% is caused by his/her environment: heritability results depend on the population studied.