PSC 162 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Behavioural Genetics, Personality Psychology, Heritability
Document Summary
Behavior genetics looks at the degree to which personality is inherited & shared among genetic relatives. Evolutionary psychology - looks at ways in which human personality ( and other behavioral propensities) may have been inherited from distant ancestors & how these propensities have been shaped over time by their consequences for survival & reproduction. Behavioral genetics is controversial with eugenics (selective breeding), the idea of cloning & belief that implies people"s fate is set at birth. Most commonly used heritability coefficient is calculated as the correlation across pairs of monozygotic twins for that trait, minus the correlation across dizygotic twins, times two: heritability quotient = (r mz 2 r dz) 2. It is the proportion of population variance that can be attributed to genetic variation, and does not apply to individuals nor to mean levels. Heritability statistics from study of monozygotic & dizygotic twins indicate that genetic variance accounts for about 40% of the phenotypic variance in many personality traits.
