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The Biological Basis Of Personality Approach

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This essay will give a description of Personality before critically analysing the biological basis of personality approach. The biological basis approach tries to account for the mechanisms between genes and personality by looking at various different brain structures whilst the biochemical approach looks at the impact of hormones and neurotransmitters. The majority of our understanding of personality from a biological perspective focuses on the three main behavioural systems; the reward system, the motivation system and the punishment system. Within this essay I will be discussing the three main theories that have come from these ideas, Eyenck’s three-factor model, Gray’s reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) and Cloningers model of personality. Human DNA is composed of roughly 30,000 genes composed of around 3 million base pairs and 99% of these are universally identical for everyone meaning they cannot be the source of personality differences in people. This suggests that the remaining genes are genetic mutations or polymorphisms, which have an influence on personality, and the biological approach uses three main methods to try and determine what % of individual differences in a trait can be attributed to genes and what % is a response to the environment. Family studies are a commonly used method as they correlate the degree of genetic overlap between family members with the degree of similarity in personality traits. In personality research they are generally used to

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