Personality Psychology

Developmental Theories

Muhammad Akram Riaz

Lecturer
Karakoram International University
Gilgit-Baltistan
Developmental Theories
Outlines
• Parents’ role in Children’s Personality development

• Chapter 4: Handbook of Personality, theory and research

Parents’ role in Children’s Personality
development
• There is now much evidence that the development of
psychological functioning is shaped by multiple forces ranging
from the biological to the familial to the cultural.

• A number of diverse elements of theory and research indicate

that from the very first days of children’s lives onward,
parents’ socialization practices play a central role in shaping
children’s psychological trajectories.
Cont.
• The most fundamental relationships in children’s lives are
often those they have with their parents.

• Even as peers become increasingly prominent in children’s

lives, parents continue to be central.

• Thus from infancy through adolescence, and perhaps

beyond, children look to parents to provide important
psychological resources.
Do Parents really Matter?
• Research in developmental behavioral genetics that uses
twin and adoption studies to estimate the genetic
contribution to human characteristics, including personality
attributes in children.

• Because identical twins are genetically identical and

fraternal twins share only about half their genes,
developmental behavioral genetics research can estimate
genetic and environmental contributions to a wide range of
human characteristics.
Cont.
• First, the proportion of variability owing to genetic
differences among individuals on many dimensions of
psychological functioning— expressed as a “heritability”
estimate—can be high.

• Heritability estimates for many personality attributes range

from .20 to .80, often at, or above, .50, indicating that from 20
to 80% of the variance in these attributes is due to genetic
influences.
Cont.
• Second, research also shows that parents respond
differentially to children’s hereditary characteristics, treating
temperamentally easy offspring much differently.

• For example, than temperamentally difficult children.

• Thus parenting practices are adapted in response to, and

sometimes evoked by, hereditary characteristics of children.

• This influence is called the “gene– environment correlation.

Cont.
• Third, in studies of the association between parenting and
children’s personality, most traditional socialization
research confounds the influence of parents’ socialization
practices with the contributions of their genes to children’s
personality development.

• Children may become prone to aggressive behavior, for

example, not only because of a home environment in which
parents are punitive and are thus models of aggressive
conduct, but also because of shared genes that contribute to
aggression in both parents and children.
Final Remarks
• Research in developmental behavior and molecular genetics
shows that the most important influences on children likely
derive from an interaction of genes with environment (Plomin
& Rutter, 1998; Rutter et al., 1997; Rutter, Moffitt, & Caspi,
2006; Rutter & Silberg, 2002).

• In particular, as molecular genetics enables investigators to

identify markers for specific genes and their associations with
behavior, they are discovering that hereditary influences are
polygenic and multifactorial, involving the impact of
multiple genes co-acting with environmental influences to
increase the probability of certain behavioral attributes.