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Loneliness and social pain
Published in Stephen Buetow, From Loneliness to Solitude in Person-centred Health Care, 2023
In this context, genes seem unlikely to account directly for loneliness. However, they appear to have a modest effect on the biological expression of persons’ inherited disposition to experience loneliness through factors like introversion or have loneliness triggered by calamities, like losing a social partner.47 Where to position sociality concerning the nature versus nurture debate remains unclear. But heritability estimates range from 14 per cent to 55 per cent across diverse populations.48 Through gene-culture coevolution,49 personality factors and social forces, such as attachment styles, appear to interact over time. They shape combinatorial opportunities including, but not limited to, cooperation to manage loneliness.
From young victim to perpetrator
Published in Panos Vostanis, Helping Children and Young People Who Experience Trauma, 2021
‘What a charming young man. Who would have thought what he was capable of?’ Which brings us to another widely used but also variably understood term, that of ‘personality disorder’. Here the forces of nature versus nurture seem to come into full play. Putting aside the developmental reasons already discussed in Chapter 1 on why we avoid using the term ‘personality’ when referring to young people roughly until the age of 18, instead referring to ‘temperament’ or ‘traits’ in children, and ‘evolving personality’ features in adolescents, personality disorders are not free of controversy in the adult forensic, probation and mental health worlds. The implications are more obvious for services, law and society as a whole. Personality disorders usually describe exacerbated human traits of various descriptions (obsessive, depressive, antisocial) that reach a state of dysfunction that cannot be ignored by the individual and/or those around him or her. This may be relatively easy to comprehend. What is fundamentally more difficult is the notion that they jump to the heights of a ‘disorder’. Does this indicate that they cannot change? Does this lead to a better understanding of one’s deficiencies, or does it absolve the person of responsibility? Most important, can these individuals be helped or treated?
Evolution, Natural Selection, and Behavior
Published in Gail S. Anderson, Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior, 2019
This is the point where the nature-versus-nurture debate is inevitably raised. The original argument about nature and nurture began a long time ago, when scientists in Europe and America were both studying behavior but looking at different sides of the same coin.1 In fact, genetics and the environment should be regarded as a continuum. All behaviors have some genetic contribution and some environmental contribution, and the division between the two groups of scientists was not as cut and dried as it seemed. Very few actually believed that behavior was either all genetically controlled or all environmentally controlled. The debate was really more about which input is most important. The amount of input from each varies with different behaviors, but nearly all have components of both, as Figure 2.5 shows. At the side of 1, the behavior is governed almost entirely by the genes, at the side of 2, it is mostly the environment, and then, there is a whole range in between.
Gaining an understanding of behavioral genetics through studies of foraging in Drosophila and learning in C. elegans
Published in Journal of Neurogenetics, 2021
Aaron P. Reiss, Catharine H. Rankin
Historically, in the study of behavior, there has been a long-standing debate of nature versus nurture, arguing whether behavior is determined by an organism’s environment and experiences or pre-determined before exposure to any external stimulus by its genes. These seemingly opposing viewpoints framed the scope of most behavioral research throughout much of the 1900s. However, due to advances in our understanding of genetics, molecular and cellular biology, and neurobiology, these differing viewpoints have been found to be intertwined; both are integral in the formation of behavior. An organism’s genetic code serves as the foundation that determines how that organism develops and functions. During development, networks of genes encode the growth and differentiation of the nervous system, the most important system in producing behavior (Sokolowski, 2001). Throughout an organism’s lifespan genes continue to produce the molecular machinery that maintain and modulate the functioning of the nervous system. Thus, an organism’s genes influence behavior significantly due to their integral role in the nervous system and throughout the rest of an organism’s body.
A peculiar condition: A history of the Jumping Frenchmen Syndrome in scientific and popular accounts
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2018
Other contemporary studies are explicitly comparative. In a 1996 book on the startle reflex, anthropologist Ronald C. Simons noted that peculiar behaviors when someone is startled have been observed in different locations around the world, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Maine, Yemen, Siberia, and the Island of Hokkaido in Japan (p. vi). “Each culture-specific elaboration is colored strongly by the local culture, has a local name, and is embedded in local traditions,” he pointed out (p. 206). The startle response can be combined with others (called startle matching), such as obeying a command or cursing (Simons, 1996, p. 152). Simons contended that cultural exploitation explains the odd locations where the startle-matching syndrome is found. “In all of these places, hyperstartlers, once identified, are assigned a status in the local culture which not only permits but which encourages others to startle them publicly and frequently,” he wrote (p. 206). Weighing in on the nature versus nurture debate surrounding the startle reflex, Simons argued, “Cultural and social factors explain not the form of the syndrome, which is everywhere pretty much the same, but rather its geographic distribution” (italics in original, p. 206).
Against the Loss of Symbolic and Psychic Gay Spaces: A Discussion of Offerings from Lingiardi, Fox, and Ariza
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2018
Lingiardi, Fox, and Ariza all take up different aspects of the importance of this kind of nonbinary thinking when trying to understand and elucidate how gay men develop a sexual identity, as well as perhaps the thornier questions of how and why they develop a particular object choice. Each of these three authors attempts to capture something that goes far beyond the binary debates of biological determinism versus upbringing and psychic phenomena in understanding the development of gay male sexuality and sexual object choice. These are not simply nature versus nurture papers. They are, however, papers that speak to a number of tensions inherent in our attempts to understand sexuality as a fundamental part of the human experience.