Personality: Permanent? It Has Been a Long

Personality: Permanent?

It has been a long controversy about how nature and nurture imply to personality traits and human behavior. Nature means that genetic factor and the system of organs control the personality, while nurture means the personality is a result of conditioned circumstances where a person is brought up. It includes the personality of other people, like family, includes the teaching, and lessons a child gains during his/her mental development process.

Recent studies find more in human biological system that genes are related to people's behavior. McInerney (2001) shows, many researchers believe that genetics factors determine how someone will act and think in his or her life. Animal and human are born with specific character linked with the genetic information in the genes. It shapes each individual trait exclusively including the performance in social, interaction, intelligence, and adaptability to the surrounding community.

Behavior may change, he states, as a person encounters "alterations in biological structures or processes," mechanically or chemically. For instance, a person's gentle personality may change dramatically after an accident that causes brain injury, therefore chemical treatment or medications - or even gene modification - is necessary to control the disorder and fix the problem.

However, this cannot be concluded from one side view. Naturally there is none of the factor gives impact to personality change stronger than the other one. Psychologist Robert Plomin as cited by Azar (1997) says, both nature and nurture influence someone's personality, in other words, there is an equal portion of genetic factors and environmental factors in determining personality. The genetics factors only "give half of the variance of most traits," and environment takes the rest of it.

Human undergoes a certain change in adaptation to the environment. It is experiencing and focusing through feeling process. According to Glendlin (1964), personality does not merely involve "intellectual or actional operations" but also includes the "feeling process." In "experiencing," human uses the existing material (basic personality) to learn through exposures to the new occurrence or situation. Environment, here is the external factor including "symbols, and actions may interact with our feeling process."

Here is when environment takes part. An observation shows that environment, like in a case of therapy or set establishing of the nurture, can facilitate a person to conduct a personality change. Setting free a personality into a proper environment most likely brings the person into a situation, which he feels exposed and able to express what the real personality is.

For example, it takes a while to create environmentally supporting condition to overcome violence problem in the case of difficult, stubborn (easily frustrated, extra sensitive) babies with difficulty "coping with change" (Cosgrove, 2000).

Adrien Raine, University of Southern California researcher, as cited by Cosgrove (2000) explains that prefrontal cortex brain damage that is important in determining one's antisocial behavior may present in people may bring the disorder from the birth. It is usually assumed that such disorders happened by head injury during accident. Both causes play the same role controlling people's loathsome behavior.

The therapy includes giving space to the subject to openness of experience, reducing tension of threatening environment and fearsome force, or even introducing gradual learning process in a comfort zone where the subject feels safe to express him/herself.

There is an extra note; Azar also gives an interesting part in the article that both influences on certain traits "change as people age." Basically, two persons are not going to react on an experience the same way since they have different chemistry in each individual. Experiences may be influenced by individual presumption, so that people may "choose certain experiences because they fit best with our innate preferences."

She explains, genetic factor may give the fundamental of certain trait, and giving the lead on subject's acceptability to the surrounding environment. It will create a special environment when "genetically distinct people" create a matching circumstances to accommodate the need, then it induces the changes too. An active correlation may occur when subject, fully aware of his/her native genetic traits, expose themselves to change, which corresponds to "genetically influenced preferences." An evocative correlation may occur because genetically distinct people evoke different reactions from parents, peers and others. For example, teachers may select musically talented children for special opportunities.