PSYC 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Gene Expression, Heritability, Carol Dweck

• School: University of Maryland
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 355
• Professor: Elizabeth Redcay

Document Summary

Child-development research yields practical benefits in diagnosing children"s problems and in helping children to overcome them. Methods to determine early vision problems: the complex interplay of nature and nurture was the constant theme of this chapter. Only some of those genes are expressed in the phenotype, one"s observable characteristics. Whether some genes are expressed at all is a function of dominance patterns. Gene expression, the switching on and off genes over time, underlies many aspects of development: the eventual outcome of a given genotype is always contingent on the environment in which it develops. Parents and their behavior toward their children are a salient part of the children"s environment. Parents" behavior toward their children is influenced by their own genotypes. Using a variety of family-study designs, behavior geneticists have discovered a wide range of behavior patterns that run in families. Many behavior geneticists use heritability estimates to statistically evaluate the relative contributions of heredity and environment to behavior.