Psychology and socialization research examine the workings of the human mind and human behavior; genetics, as a branch of biology, examines the way in which traits and predispositions are transmitted from parents to their children as a result of genetic recombination. The relationship between psychology, in contrast, and biology and genetics, has never been easy.
Genetics affects virtually everything about living organisms. Psychology’s greatest involvement with genetics concerns genetic differences among people, and books such as Plomin et al.’s (2003) Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era embody that emphasis. In A Holistic Conceptualization of Stress and Disease, Newberry et al. (1991) detail the numerous pathways linking psychological variables to disease
Medical genetics is the study of the interrelationship between human biological variation, including both genetic and environmental sources, and the phenotypic outcomes of health and disease. The field has rapidly moved to the forefront of biomedical research. Its overall goal is the detection and treatment of pathological genetic variation. In the past, medical genetics focused
In its broadest sense, genetics is the science of biological variation. It focuses on variation that results from inheritance, the process by which characters are passed from parents to their offspring. This often places genetics in contrast to the environment, even though one is not sufficient without the other. For thousands of years, humans have
Human genetics is the study of the inheritance of epigenetic traits among humans, notably but not exclusively traits of medical interest. The overarching goal of human genetics is to apply knowledge of human heredity to a better understanding of diversity in development and adaptation as “nature is nurtured.” Another central goal of human genetics is
Population genetics is the study of the inheritance, distribution, and fluctuation of allele frequencies as affected by the four main forces of evolutionary genomics: natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and migration. Population genetics is the overarching discipline of which quantitiative genetics is a crucial subfield that calculates selective effects. Ecological genetics is another subfield that
Whereas medical genetics is the study of the genetics of human disease, clinical genetics deals with the direct clinical care of people with genetic diseases. Clinical genetics encompasses the scientific methods and their application in clinical practice, with the focus on human diseases caused by genetic variation. The principal concerns of clinical genetics include clinical
As soon as fundamental principles of genetic inheritance were clearly established in the early twentieth century, anthropologists began using these principles and new empirical data to illuminate long-standing problems of human variation and primate phylogeny. Initially focusing on human blood characteristics, geneticists quantified regional differences in ABO genotype, and tried to correlate these differences with
The idea that genetics may play a determining role in work behavior and work-related phenomena does not have a particularly long past in terms of actual research activity among industrial-organizational psychologists. Whereas research in other domains of psychology convincingly have shown that human behavior is influenced by genetic and biological characteristics of individuals, it was
This article delves into the intricate relationship between genetics and mental health disorders within the realm of health psychology. Beginning with a succinct introduction to mental health disorders, the narrative unfolds by elucidating the genetic basis of these conditions, supported by evidence from twin, family, and adoption studies. The article explores the dynamic interplay of