Background: Adaptation is key to survival. An organism must adapt to environmental challenges in order to be able to thrive in the environment in which they find themselves. Resilience can be thought of as a measure of the ability of an organism to adapt, and to withstand challenges to its stability. In higher animals, the brain is a key player in…

The past two decades have seen an explosion in research in the fields of violence and trauma and behavior genetics. These two fields came into direct conflict when Lisabeth Fisher DiLalla and Irving I. Gottesman outlined a fundamental conceptual limitation of trauma and violence research: that rather than being causal, the well-documented…

This paper considers key properties of behavioral phenotypes of mental retardation syndromes, including within-syndrome variability and between-syndrome similarities and qualitative differences. The "new genetics" research requires combining data from three strategies: (1) a psychiatric approach, (2) psychometric methods, and (3) syndrome-specific…

Despite a substantial body of research suggesting genetic influence on educationally relevant behavioural traits, it is not clear how the nature-nurture question is perceived by teachers. In order to answer this question, we surveyed 667 UK primary school teachers, and for comparison also surveyed 1,340 parents about their perceptions of genetic…

Noting that beyond the individual variations among humans, there is a body of mental abilities common to every human being, this book examines the debate among researchers about the extent to which humans are "preprogrammed," and suggests a new scientific psychology of human development. By examining experimental data obtained from…

This paper reviews the research on fragile X syndrome, the second most common cause of mental retardation related to chromosomal anomaly. It notes that far more males than females are affected by the fragile X syndrome, which typically results in craniofacial changes, delays in growth and development, speech/language difficulties, and cognitive…