Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Prenatal Diagnosis, Gene Expression, Cytosine

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Lynda Hutchinson

Document Summary

Nativists: emphasized genes and inborn characteristics (nature) Empiricists: focused on learning and experience (nurture) Evolutionary psychology: researchers emphasize the evolutionary mechanisms that might help explain commonalities in language learning, attention, perception, memory, sexual behaviour, emotion, reasoning, and many other aspects of human psychology. Behavioural genetics: researchers attempt to tease apart the relative contributions of heredity and environment to explain individual differences in personality, mental ability and other characteristics. Scientists today understand that heredity and environment constantly interact to produce out psychological traits and even most of our physical ones. First, genes affect the kinds of experiences we have. The study of this type of stable change in gene expression (that does not involve changes in the underlying dna structure) is called epigenetics. Genes are the basic units of heredity that are composed of dna and located on chromosomes. Chromosomes: rod-shaped structures found in the nucleus of every cell (23 pairs)