Nature And Nurture Debate In Psychology

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Children are born as blank slates, Nature/Nurture debate in developmental Psychology, theoretical and research literature

The nature/nurture debate of Psychology is one as old as time, it can be traced back to early philosophers such as Aristotle who proposed the theory of ‘Tabula Rasa’ that all humans are born as blank slates and that over time we come to be who we are. The other side of this debate proposes that humans are born with some form of innate knowledge, what this knowledge might be varies from source to source. This debate is of particular interest to contemporary Psychology as it questions whether personality, intelligence and mental illness is a product of genetics or a form of conditioning experienced throughout life. Both nature …show more content…
Feral children are those who for a significant part of their formative years have been isolated or may have lived sans human contact entirely. It has been found that these so called wild children often adapt to their surroundings and take on characteristics necessary for their survival. Oxana Malaya was an 8 year old feral child from Ukraine, she was raised by dogs and when rescued was observed to have extremely doglike behaviour, even communicating via barks and walking on all fours, purportedly she had heightened senses of hearing and smell, however no formal scientific analysis was ever performed on her, so observations are anecdotal. A well researched case study in the Psychology of linguistics is that of ‘Genie’(pseudonym). Genie was a child deprived of nearly all social contact for the first 13 years of her life, trapped in isolation by her father; upon rescue experiments were performed to deduce her linguistic and cognitive ability, both of which were severely impaired; areas of her brain even showed shrinkage from underuse(Salus and Curtiss 1979) . Linguistically Genie also showed severe language impairment, while capable of learning individual words she lacked the ability to produce full sentences and never acquired a first language(Salus and Curtiss 1979).Both of these cases exhibit clear signs that nurture is more integral than nature, children lacking proper care and interaction may not develop the cognitive function to express language and integrate into society. The argument could be made however that these children were prone to feral behaviour due to their nature, the case of Oxana though anecdotal would contradict this as she now leads a relatively normal life and has a full vocabulary, Genie also showed great capacity to adapt to
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