Mental Disorders: Nature Vs. Nurture

Mental health is extremely important to an individual’s well-being. One’s behavior and personality tendencies greatly affect the way one functions in the world. When an individual’s mental health is distorted, it affects many important aspects of their life. People that are having trouble dealing with these cognitive disorders may receive treatment to subside the problem. They may have questions on why they have these mental imbalances, and why they act a certain way. The thriving controversy, “Nature vs. Nurture” answers these questions by explaining how a person’s personality, intelligence, behavior, and ability were brought about. The controversy between the two makes two individual theories that have been questioned for centuries. Some

Genetics was one of the major scientific accomplishments of the twentieth century. It is the study of genes, heredity, and genetic variation in living things (Plomin 2010). When parents decide they want to have children, their children inherit bits and pieces of genes that give them certain distinct traits. For example, if two people with brown eyes produced offspring, there is a high chance that their children will have brown eyes as well. There are many factors that come into play when inheriting certain physical traits, but some scientists theorized that humans acquire behavior and personality from genes as well. This theory is one side of the broader topic called “Nature vs. Nurture”, nature being the side that has a biological outlook. Regarding the biological factors that help support this side, it would be important to mention that these theories are always changing. Nevertheless, personality is said to be inherited along with slight environmental factors that may affect it. Scientists came up with a few conclusions after doing quantitative genetic experiments on twins and adopted children (Plaisance & Reydon 2012). The experiments consist of observing the way identical twins, separated at birth, acted in different environments. Taking into account, identical twins have the same genetic make-up. When Plaisance and Reydon observed their data, it showed that twins separated into different environments did share

Some scientists think that behavior and personality correspond with genetics and environment. A theory that came from an article about human development states that adaptation, human genetics, and the environment are all connected. Over the years human genes have adapted to the environments that humans lived in. The human race has gone from a very simple lifestyle to a complex lifestyle with the past century. This made humans acquire evolutionary traits (Gottesman & Hanson 2005). The significance of that theory proves that the environment and genetics has shaped the human race to what it is now. Scientists that contributed to a review that had to do with genetic and environmental correspondence said, “Children exposed to an environment stressor known to increase risk for a certain psychiatric disorder (e.g., high family adversity) are at a higher risk for that disorder if they carry particular gene variants which renders them more susceptible to that stressor” (Wermter 2010). This means that environmental factors can develop a disorder in a child, only if they have a specific genetic make-up (Wermter 2010). That is just one example of how genes and environment can control how an individual behaves. Another conclusion that counteracts with the previous one is, “Alternatively children carrying a genotype known to increase susceptibility for a specific