Cultural Aspects of Quantitative Genetic Investigations

Abstract

Abstract The fields of quantitative genetics, adult development, and aging as well as cultural psychology often draw from perspectives in positive psychology to explain phenomena within their disciplines. The discussion in this chapter is on using positive psychology perspectives to further elucidate the complicated relationships found in the integration of adult development and aging research with cultural psychology, using a quantitative genetic approach to examine individual differences. Social scientists have long been engaged in an epic search for the sources of individual variation in the development and aging of humans. Research has led to various methodologies in an effort to account for the differences found between people. One of those methodologies is quantitative genetics, which, in part, grew out of opposition to the “environmentalist” view that only factors from the environment are involved in interindividual variability (Plomin, Defries, McClearn, & Rutter, 1997). However, the absence of environmental causal factors in molecular genetic models and theories swings the pendulum of reductionism too far in the opposite direction.