PSYC 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Heritability, Determinism, Twin Study

• School: UBC
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 101
• Professor: Janel Fergusson

Document Summary

Dominant vs recessive gene: dominant: the dominant gene is the trait you will have capital letter, recessive: you need a pair of those genes to have that trait lower case letter. Issues with adoption studies: hard to track down biological parents, ethical issues, small sample sizes, children might have recessive genes, but you can"t see that in their biological parents, biological/adoptive parents = similar, prenatal environment. Twin studies: compare the similarity between monozygotic and dizygotic twins. Heritability (a lot learned from twin studies: refers to how much of the variation in a particular trait is attributable to variation in genetics, heritability coefficient. 0. 0 = none of the variability: high variability coefficients: height, weight, intelligence, skin colour, etc. (iq is the highest among psychological traits) Low variability coefficients: the colour of the shirt you"re wearing: doesn"t tell us anything about a particular person.