PSYC 317
Nature via Nurture: Explorations in Developmental Psychobiology
Last Offered Spring 2006
Division III
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Do your genes determine who you are? This course examines the relative contributions of nature (genetics) and nurture (the environment) to the development of behaviors such as eating, stress response, learning, play, aggression, parenting, alcoholism, drug addiction, schizophrenia and depression. Modern neuroscience techniques, such as brain imaging, “knock-out” mice, and quantitative trait loci mapping, report extraordinary new relationships between genes and behavior. In contrast to these findings are equally innovative studies on the critical effects of the pre- and postnatal environment and the social milieu which support environmental causation of behavior. This tutorial will evaluate theoretical and methodological issues in the scientific literature to arrive at a synthetic understanding of the epigenetics of behavior. Each tutorial pair will design and conduct an empirical project that will explore their own experimental question about the interaction of genes and environment.