HCB 2063 GENERAL PSHYCOLOGY JANUARY 2015 SEMESTERTERM ASSIGNMENT PAPER

Effects of Heredity and Environment on human development.(Specific Examples on my own development).

Student Name: Aban John Robert ID: 17887Department: Petroleum Engineering (PE).

Instructor: Dr. Ahmad Shahrul Nizam Isha.

Introduction

Heredity is the passage of biological traits or characteristics from parents to offspring through the inheritance of genes. It greatly influences the different aspects of human growth and development. Biologically speaking heredity is the sum total of potential traits that describes a childs resemblance to his/her parents i.e. in terms of height, weight, shape, colour of hair and eye, intelligence, and other characteristics. .

Environment equally plays an important role in human development. I can define environment broadly as all the psychological settings that impact who we are, including our early childhood experiences, how we were raised, our social relationships, and our surrounding culture. Or shortly all aspects of human interaction with their surrounding that impacts individual behavior and development.There are different types of environment such as physical, learning, social and cultural settings, psychological environment, etc.

According to Kalat (2010) Heredity and environment interact and within this interaction, human development is possible. Together these two factors affect human development in physical, behavioral, learning and personality aspects.In this paper, I will share how these two factors (heredity and environment) have affected my development from childhood to who I am today.

1. Heredity Point of View.

Resemblance. I am the first born in our family. I have five (5) siblings born by a different person after the death of my father. Although I have never seen my father since childhood, I have always heard three quarter (3/4) of the people in my community compare me as resembling my father. Most often, some mistakenly call me in my fathers names. I found it difficult to accept or disagree because I was born while he was away in the front line working as a military officer and died before I could see him. Unfortunately, I did not even see any of his pictures to compare the claimed resemblance and my mother too separated from me for a long time. However, after reunion with my mother, she also said that I took the shape of my father. For example, she has always jogged that I have red lips, ears, mirrored eyes and scarce hair which looks exactly like my father had. I came to understand this claims after I studied biology and now psychology to know how genetic influences human physical appearance.

This particularly means that my father transmitted the genes for physical characteristics to me. Although this might be true, I still reject some similarity descriptions. Example people say my Dad was tall and had weight than me. Or could be my mother transferred to me the genes for weight and height because she is as small and short as I am. Another reason I believe could be because my father grew under full care of his parents. He had full parental support and feeding and they lived in town where there are many priorities. Unlike my father, my childhood growth was mostly in the village with my grandmother who had little support to give. At the same time, there is no good explanation to this because my peers have the same body size and height like me. Or it could be because I spent most of the time schooling outside my country where there are differences in food and regional climatic changes. I studied my primary and high school in Uganda which is outside my country and now for my University in Malaysia. I believe that this continuous life in school with academic loads/stress, changes in food and exposure to different environments has also affected my development. Activities: In separate arguments, my grandmother has always described the most favorite activities that my Dad liked during his childhood and adult ages. For example his creativity in arts and crafts. He could make local stools and tables out of wood when he was about 5 years old. While in school, he was very intelligent and produced excellent academic performance. While most of the resemblance claims could be true, I personally disagree with some of them. I luck some of these characteristics as always described by my grandmother. For example, my Dads creativity in Arts and Crafts is something I am very poor at. Sincerely drawing arts and crafts is the most difficult task I have encountered and its one of the courses that I obtained an F grade while in high school. So, I will argue that this particular trait of liking or being good at something is not necessarily a hereditary characteristic. However, I share some features with my Dad like being good in school and social interaction with people. Just like he had excellent academic performance, I have too been producing good results in school. This common may mean that I inherited the gene for intelligence from my Dad.

Personality: My Dad was also an army man which means he was a brave if not an aggressive man which does not represent any of my personality and joining the army is actually the last thing I could do. In another case may be because he joined army due to the death of his father or got influenced by friends. I love soccer, music and athletics which none of my parents does and the element influencing me to like this activities, is mainly friends and availability of these activities. I can play music from my phone, my computer and other portable devices which my parents didnt have during their time.

Shared Characteristics: There are few shared characteristics between me and my mother. The most notable one is the height and weight. Another recognizable trait is being quiet and emotional. Like my mum, I am a humble and quiet person with high prevalence of emotions. From my five (5) siblings, only the boys (2) resemble their father but my three (3) sisters have shared characteristics most of which are from my mother and none of them resemble me. 2. Environmental Point of view.

As explained in the examples below:-

2.1). Parental care: I am certain that the experiences received during the earliest childhood years have impacted my development. At about 3 years old, I separated from my parents due to war in the country for a period of 15 years. For all this long until 2005 when peace returned, I was nursed and raised by my grandmother. I truly missed the companion of my parents and received teasing and abuses from my peers. They most of the time mocked me with names such as Lost Kid which was emotionally disturbing. Somehow until to date I have developed to be very sensitive and emotional when someone tries to talk about my personality. However, as a grown up person to day I have forgotten some of these tempers. This is because I met friends who had similar situations and others even had worse living conditions than mine. However, my grandmother is really very strong and responsible. She nursed and sent me to school until I re-united with my mother in 2005. This was a great moment for me to smile and feel secure within my peers although it was also still sad since my Dad died while fighting as an army. Since that moment I totally changed, I could get the necessary treatment from my mother, she sent me to a very good school outside my country which truly inspired and changed my growth. In fact I should say, growing without both parents left me with negative temperaments and emotions although these are slowly fading today as I develop to be more matured adult. This is an influence of environment.

2.2). Education: I must admit that school has made up an enormous part of my life development. It would be fair to say that I have spent more time in school environments than any other place including my country or my family. Most of the experience I gained from school have helped to shape my knowledge on problem solving and recognizing the diversity of the world. With this experience I have learnt to cope up with challenging situations and how to overcome them. Given any problem, I am always confident that a potential solution can be found. Although genetic background may have an influence on my ability to learn, I believe that good educational settings and exposure to the diverse teaching environment has helped to enhance these abilities. The exposure includes skills to operate complex experimental equipment, machines and working with different computerized technologies to analyze and provide solutions to difficult problems. I gained this skill mostly in UTP than I was in my country. Figures 1 & 2 in Appendix shows my school experience in high and school and now in the University.Through high quality education my thinking capabilities improved towards providing reasonable judgments that is sound and which depicts maturity. For example in my primary through high school, speaking in public was the most disastrous thing I could do. I was too shy and shaky to stand before people to give a speech or comment on anything or even attend public meetings. However, this behavior slowly faded as I progressed and got exposed to various gatherings, presentations and meetings. My language and communication skills improved and fear for public speaking is no more which is a positive developmental change in mind and body. This change has helped me in overcoming panic especially in Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) where we need to do presentations, gather for meetings and write projects in a concise manner. Therefore, although heredity determines a persons abilities, I strongly accept that education as an element of environment has placed an impact on my learning, knowledge, language, thinking/problem solving and development in communication skills.

2.3). peers: While my child's early social experiences were centered on family members, this lately expanded to the neighborhood and at school. Because I spent much time at school, interacting with fellow students of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, my earlier perceptions as a kid have totally changed. The emotions and tempers that I had at childhood are integrated into positive feelings and social interactions. I have met both good and bad friends and through their behaviors and attitudes, I learnt to adjust to situations accordingly. For example, when I was ten (10) years old in primary school my friends influenced me to drink alcohol and move to night clubs. When my family realized about this they immediately transferred me to a different school where the rules are very strict. From that moment to date, I tried to target relationship with friends that are supportive and have similar life style like me.

Since then, I realized that age was a major factor for accepting any friendship without assessing the kind of person to move with. Today I have grown to be independent and careful about the type of people to befriend and share social interactions with. After evaluating the past behavior during my middle age, I changed positively and left drinking Alcohol. Although some of my friends drink and smoke, I have resisted this behavior especially after coming to Malaysia. The only activities we do here is either academic related or sports which usually brings us together. In fact my coming to Malaysia has changed most of my behaviors and way of handling issues of different settings. Back in my high school for example, we could gather and sleep in groups, noisy all times which affected my academic performance to some extent. Here in UTP, there is no such association and sleeping in groups, thus gives me enough time to plan and do my academic job and this has worked in improving my performance.

2.4). Culture adds yet another element that strongly influences development. It is a way of life that impose limits on behaviors across societies (Yates, et al, 1996). My personal experience in different cultural environments is part and partial of the behavioral pattern that I poses. I can break this experience into few sections as follows:-

2.4.1). Symbols and gestures: These two elements are common across cultures in the world. Especially for me who studied outside my country or hometown for a very long time, symbols and gestures have really impacted my understanding of non-verbal communication. For example when I was studying in Uganda, blinking an eye to someone especially ladies was a sign of mocking or flirting yet in my country it is a sign we use to alert someone. Also handling hands when walking together as boys was perceived as gay behavior which is a normal expression in my community. So in Uganda, I had to learn many symbols and gestures to be able to fit in their society comfortably. The same is true with various gestures like thumb-ups, whistling, etc. I learnt that these symbols portray different meanings in different countries although others have common meanings. Whenever I go for holidays to my home country, my friends get confused with most gestures that I display until I explain to them the meaning. This is all because of diversity in cultural environments and people. In fact I am always very careful when making a gesture and in most cases I prefer verbal communication.

2.4.2). Language forms another environmental factor that influences human development. For example I am able to communicate in my Language because I was born and grew from my home town where everyone speak the same language. This would be different if I was born and grew in an environment where no one speaks my language. Although it is obvious that I should speak the same language as my parents, this is never a good explanation. Language is related to interactions and where one grows from. And this is true because I entered school with one language in mind but today, I can speak many languages; English, Kiswahili, Arabic, Acholi, and now bit of Malay. This is all because of interacting with people from different cultural entities which have nothing to do with heredity. I also learnt that some names and words have different meanings which are perceptions of something else in other languages. Example in Malay, Abang means brother but means circumstance in my language.

2.4.3). Food is another potential factor that has influenced my development. Just like I have repeatedly mentioned, I have spent 3/4 of my life schooling outside my country. This possibly have a hand in shaping the kind of person I am today. For example, the main stable food eaten in my community is corn, cassava and beans which is common to all homes. More so, we dont eat spices and sea food and only limited to certain vegetables and fruits. This in one way or the other really changes my digestion habits and body response to various foods. In fact my coming to Malaysia has left me with serious digestive disorder which I blame mostly on the spicy food. Just after a year here in UTP, I started to develop a rare digestive behavior, sometimes I rarely go to the toilet and sometimes cannot pass bowel normally. In fact the doctor told me to eat more vegetables because I lacked fibers in my body. More so, I am not comfortable with eating rice as this digests very fast and makes me very hungry in few hours. I have always jogged to my mother that the only reason I call her most often is to tell her that I miss her food. Figure 3 in Appendix section shows food in my country and Malaysia. I believe when I go back to my country, adapting to the taste of the food will take sometimes.

2.4.4). Cultural beliefs, norms, values and traditions: I do acknowledge some few areas in which beliefs and traditions have formed part of my development especially in social interaction. Good example is Religion and other typical cultural norms like rituals and ceremonies which are the most sensitive elements in many cultures globally. My moral values mostly follows my belief in Christianity and those being displayed at the level of my community. These beliefs and values are a result of exposure to teachings and practices in school, prayers, etc. which I personally accept as experiences received from the environment and have nothing to do with heredity. My parents being Christians could be the main reason for my moral values and practices in Christianity but not that they transmitted the genes for these values in me. I also believe that traditional practices and rituals are factors in my development. For example, I cannot marry unless I go to my community and perform a traditional ritual for recognition as an adult. Even if I neglect this strict norms and cultural laws, my marriage will not be respected and valued by the elders.

In a related development, I have learnt to respect and recognize the variation and existence of different beliefs, norms and traditions wherever I have lived or studied. I gained much of this experience in Malaysia for example not being in contact or greeting Muslim ladies which is free in the case of my culture. After staying in Malaysia for 3 years, I got used to the culture and this had much influence when I went for my internship earlier last year. Sometimes, I could still forget and just wave a hand to greet a lady although they were getting close to me. I realized I was already used to the attitude until a month where I normalized. Also in Malaysia, people drive on the left side of the road which is oppose to right hand side in my Country. These and other factors discussed in this chapter are majorly environmental related attributes that have in one way or the other placed a big impact on my development throughout the growth cycles. At the same time, some of these elements helped me to understand why people behave as they do.Conclusion.

It is undeniable that heredity plays an important role in dictating many aspects of who I am today. This is particularly true in regard to my physical characteristics and genetic makeup. But I am of the same time, environment is highly responsible for influencing my behavior, health, perceptions, problem solving approaches, social life and several other non-physical attributes that I possess. I would therefore comment that both heredity and environment interact to give expression for the development of behaviors and other physical characteristics that are built in me.

Reference

James.W.Kalat (2010). Introduction to Psychology. Wardsworth Publishing, 9th edition.

Ge X, Conger RD, Cadoret RJ, Neiderhiser JM, Yates W, et al. (1996). The developmental interface between nature and nurture: a mutual influence model of child antisocial behavior and parent behaviors. Development Psychology 32:574-589.

Appendix

Figure 1. My high school experience

Figure 2. My University experience (UTP)

Figure 4. Malaysian FoodFigure 3. South Sudanese Food

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