PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Twin, Foxp2, Heritability

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Ingrid Johnsrude

Document Summary

Nature vs. nurture: psychologists are now in agreement that all behaviour results from both nature and nurture. Nativism: the philosophical view that we are born with knowledge already present (nature) Empiricism: the philosophical view that we obtain all knowledge through our senses (nurture) Behavioural genetics: the study of genetic influences on behaviour. If an individual is born to parents who have alcohol problems, that person could inherit the genes that create a sensitivity for alcohol, but he or she must decide to go drink. If not, they are heterozygous: the pairs of genes at a locus are called alleles (p. 66) one from the mother and one from the father. One gene may be dominant over the other. Heritability: the amount of variability in a given trait in a given population at a given time due to genetic factors; measured as h2 and sometimes referred to by this measure instead of the word.