Nature and Nurture

I found the research on pages 440-441 of our textbook showing the interaction between nature and nurture very interesting. In the study African American families participated in Parent-adolescent training sessions to improve family cohesion and communication. Parents received teaching on nurturing and guiding their children. The children (all 11 years old) were taught the importance of household rules, dealing with racism, making life goals and avoiding alcohol.  4 years after the study began the researchers became aware of the new genetic research showing a positive correlation for risky behavior in teens with the short allele of the 5-HTTLPR gene. When they separated the participants into two groups, those with the genetic risk and those without the genetic risk, the training sessions at age 11 were shown to have a significant impact on the genetically-at-risk teens, but no impact on the genetically-not-at-risk adolescents, compared to controls. The Parent-adolescent training completely negated the genetic risk, at age 14 these genetically-at-risk adolescents had not engaged in more risky behavior than both the experimental group and control in the group of not-genetically-at-risk adolescents. This illustrates quite well that the interaction of genes and environment makes us who we are and that with the right environmental inputs, negative genetic influences may have little or no affect.