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Nature VS Nurture Theories of Personality in 21st Century

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Nature vs Nurture theories have wasted a lot of energy of human beings. Plato is considered first to realize that you are made of not only flesh but also an intellectual soul. The issue may be much older... In Greek Mythology, when gods created man, they endowed him with divinity. However, the man started challenging them. They feared his potentials and decided to deprive him of the might. "Where to hide the divinity?" was the big question They considered heights of icy mountains, limits of superior stars and pits of the earth. But every place was accessible to man’s capabilities. Then they decided to hide it within the man himself. Since then the man has been climbing icy mountains. He has navigated deep seas. He has traversed moon. His machines have even touched Mars. But he is still superficial for his ‘lost paradise’. Man, it is inside you! They call it personality now. It is ‘scientific’ to ask how it comes into being. Is it inheritable? Is it natural? Is it outcome of environment? Have you any will to change your behaviors or you are bound to follow the dictates? Nature vs Nurture theories focus upon these issues. The radical discoveries in genome and quantum physics have revived the debate. Incidentally, more they discover, much they bewilder. The abstraction continues intensifying. How to Define Nature VS Nurture Theories --------------------------------------------------- There are three characteristic schools of thought. 1- Personality is Natural: This group believes that your personality is result of evolutionary process. You inherit behaviors due to complex interaction of genes. They control your behaviors. So you don’t have a free will to act otherwise. 2- Personality is Nurtured: This group argues that you don’t get your personality inherited. Your mind is a blank slate at your birth. It is your environment, education and culture that make up your behaviors. There are differences on the issue of ‘free will’ to change your behaviors. 3- Personality is Spiritual: This group claims that your personality is result of neither nature nor nurture. It is gift of some deity. They are split on the issue of ‘free will’. Nature VS Nurture Theories and Evolutionary Psychology ------------------------------------------------------------------ Darwin’s theory of evolution led William Hamilton, George Williams and many others to the idea of personality evolution. They proposed that like carnal organs, your personality is result of natural selection for survival of the fittest. You do as your genes dictate. They suggest that fear of death, fear of injury, fear of snakes, shyness, addiction, criminality and sexual orientation are main examples of inherited behaviors. Steven Pinker (2004) includes religiousness, liberalism and conservativeness in the list. William Paley considers cognitive capabilities, temperaments and unfaithful behaviors inheritable. However, there is strong criticism on this approach. 1- There is no single universal behavior which can be proved evolutionary. Even fear of death, that seems unbleached to all, is overridden in crusades, suicides and suicide bombings. 2- You are made of 25,000 to 30,000 genes. They are merely twice to the number in a fruit fly. Chimpanzees share 95% of your genetic characteristics. However, they don’t share flat 10% of your behaviors. 3- People don’t differ in behaviors as they do differ in skin pigments. Extroverts, introverts, optimists, pessimists, criminals, liberals etc are found in all societies and cultures. flat identical twins (with 100% analogous genes) and fraternal twins (with 50% similar genes) behave differently in most of the cases. 4- No genome scientist has related genes or a set of genes with any kind of behaviors. 5- There are a good number of living organisms and fossils which suggest intermediary stages to the physical evolution. However, no much intermediary stages are available for personality evolution. Nature VS Nurture Theories and Physics --------------------------------------------- The discoveries in physics have always provided new meat to the nature vs nurture theories. The conclusions of Newton and Einstein helped the people to believe that future events can be expected with the help of echt knowledge of matter and unbleached laws. This led psychologists to suggest that your future behaviors can be predetermined. The entire mechanism of psychometrics follows this hypothesis. However, quantum physics has changed the situation altogether. Evidence proves that you can’t make two (almost) simultaneous measurements of observables correctly. For example: 1- Position and momentum of a particle 2- Position and direction of a particle 3- Time and frequency of a sound wave 4- Wavelength and magnitude of a sound wave The list goes on... The quantum physics has agitated determinism. So much so the scientists have to devise “Heisenberg uncertainty principle” which challenges that any physical event can be predicted precisely in time and space. Do you think that particles are too small to affect queen-size events? Reconsider it. What would happen if Hitler had died in his young age of cancer, which can occur with a weak genetic mutation? Nature VS Nurture Theories and Reality -------------------------------------------- “What was the first cause?” Aristotle had asked centuries before It has been proved that the universe is not result of infinite series of collaborating causes and events. There was a first event; the queen-size bang just 13.7 billions year ago. What was its cause? There can be only two answers: 1- There was no preceding cause, or 2- There was a early Causer When you affirm the first statement, you agree that there might be other events which don’t have preceding causes. The birth of personality is one of them. However, if you agree with the second statement, then you are siding with the spiritual school of thought. What About Environment? --------------------- It plays very important role in making of your behaviors. However, any behavior that you acquire is amendable. Secondly, it is not only environment that influences you, the vice versa is also true. You can count hundreds of names who influenced their environments, cultures and societies. The best advice is to believe in your personality. Use your free will to develop and refine your behaviors. Utilize complete out capabilities to collect smaller successes daily to build big one in future. Your way of thinking and style of doing shall determine your destination. Meanwhile, let the counsels of nature vs nurture theories to continue with their confusing debates.
	 	 

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    His judgment and grasp of objective, physical reality is impaired, and

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    The members of the serviceable school regard psychological health disorders as perturbations in the proper, statistically "normal", behaviours and manifestations of "healthy" individuals, or as dysfunctions. The "sick" separate – ill at ease with himself (ego-dystonic) or making others unhappy (deviant) – is "mended" when rendered serviceable again by the prevailing standards of his social and cultural frame of reference.

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    Indeed, personality disorders are an superior example of the kaleidoscopic landscape of "objective" psychiatry.

    The classification of Axis II personality disorders – deeply ingrained, maladaptive, lifelong behavior patterns – in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, ordinal edition, text revision [American Psychiatric Association. DSM-IV-TR, Washington, 2000] – or the DSM-IV-TR for brief – has come under sustained and serious criticism from its inception in 1952, in the first edition of the DSM.

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    The polythetic form of the DSM's characteristic Criteria – single a subset of the criteria is adequate grounds for a diagnosis – generates unacceptable characteristic heterogeneity. In opposite words, people diagnosed with the unvarying personality disorder may share only cardinal criterion or none.

    The DSM fails to clarify the exact relationship between Axis II and Axis I disorders and the way chronic childhood and developmental problems interact with personality disorders.

    The differential diagnoses are vague and the personality disorders are insufficiently demarcated. The result is excessive co-morbidity (multiple Axis II diagnoses).

    The DSM contains little discussion of what distinguishes mean character (personality), personality traits, or personality style (Millon) – from personality disorders.

    A dearth of documented clinical experience regarding both the disorders themselves and the utility of various treatment modalities.

    Numerous personality disorders are "not other specified" – a catchall, basket "category".

    Cultural bias is evident in definite disorders (such as the Antisocial and the Schizotypal).

    The emergence of multidimensional alternatives to the categorical approach is acknowledged in the DSM-IV-TR itself:

    “An alternative to the categorical approach is the dimensional perspective that Personality Disorders represent maladaptive variants of personality traits that merge imperceptibly into normality and into one another” (p.689)

    The favourable issues – daylong neglected in the DSM – are likely to be tackled in prospective editions as healed as in topical research. But their omission from formal discourse hitherto is both startling and telling:

    The lengthways course of the disorder(s) and their temporal stability from early childhood onwards;

    The genetic and biological underpinnings of personality disorder(s);

    The development of personality psychopathology during childhood and its emergence in adolescence;

    The interactions between physiological health and disease and personality disorders;

    The effectiveness of various treatments – talk therapies as well as psychopharmacology.

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    Certain mental health afflictions are either correlated with a statistically abnormal biochemical activity in the brain – or are ameliorated with medication. Yet the two facts are not ineludibly facets of the unvarying underlying phenomenon. In other words, that a given medicine reduces or abolishes certain symptoms does not necessarily nasty they were caused by the processes or substances sick by the drug administered. Causation is only one of many possible connections and chains of events.

    To incoming a pattern of behaviour as a mental health disorder is a value judgment, or at best a statistical observation. Such designation is effected heedless of the facts of brain science. Moreover, correlation is not causation. abnormal brain or body biochemistry (once titled "polluted animal spirits") do exist – but are they truly the roots of mental perversion? Nor is it clear which triggers what: do the aberrant neurochemistry or biochemistry cause psychological illness – or the other way around?

    That hallucinogenic medication alters behaviour and mood is indisputable. So do illicit and sanctioned drugs, certain foods, and all social interactions. That the changes brought active by prescription are desirable – is debatable and involves tautological thinking. If a certain pattern of behaviour is described as (socially) "dysfunctional" or (psychologically) "sick" – clearly, every change would be welcomed as "healing" and all agent of transformation would be titled a "cure".

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    IV. The Variance of Mental Disease

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    This was to be expected. The human mind and its dysfunctions are alike around the world. But values differ from time to time and from cardinal place to another. Hence, disagreements active the propriety and desirability of hominian actions and inaction are bound to arise in a symptom-based diagnostic system.

    As long as the pseudo-medical definitions of mental health disorders continue to rely exclusively on signs and symptoms – i.e., mostly on observed or reported behaviours – they remain penetrable to such discord and devoid of much-sought universality and rigor.

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