RETRIEVAL PRACTICE Take a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within this section). Then click the 'show answer' button to check your answers. Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term retention (McDaniel et al., 2009).

Our genetic predispositions and our specific environments interact. Environments can trigger gene activity, and genetically influenced traits can evoke responses from others.
     As a child’s brain develops, neural connections grow more numerous and complex. Experiences then prompt a pruning process, in which unused connections weaken and heavily used ones strengthen. Early childhood is an important period for shaping the brain, but throughout our lives our brain modifies itself in response to our learning.

Parents influence their children in areas such as manners and political and religious beliefs, but not in other areas, such as personality. As children attempt to fit in with their peers, they tend to adopt their culture—styles, accents, slang, attitudes. By choosing their children’s neighborhoods and schools, parents exert some influence over peer group culture.

A culture is an enduring set of behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group and transmitted from one generation to the next. Cultural norms are understood rules that inform members of a culture about accepted and expected behaviors. Cultures differ across time and space.

Within any culture, the degree of individualism or collectivism varies from person to person. Cultures based on self-reliant individualism, like those found in North America and Western Europe, tend to value personal independence and individual achievement. They define identity in terms of self-esteem, personal goals and attributes, and personal rights and liberties. Cultures based on socially connected collectivism, like those in many parts of Asia and Africa, tend to value interdependence, tradition, and harmony, and they define identity in terms of group goals, commitments, and belonging to one’s group.

In psychology, gender is the socially influenced characteristics by which people define men and women. Sex refers to the biologically influenced characteristics by which people define males and females. Our gender is thus the product of the interplay among our biological dispositions, our developmental experiences, and our current situation.

We are more alike than different, thanks to our similar genetic makeup—we see, hear, learn, and remember similarly. Males and females do differ in body fat, muscle, height, age of onset of puberty, life expectancy, and vulnerability to certain disorders. Men admit to more aggression than women do, and they are more likely to be physically aggressive. Women’s aggression is more likely to be relational. In most societies, men have more social power, and their leadership style tends to be directive, whereas women’s is more democratic. Women focus more on social connectedness, and they “tend and befriend.”

Both sex chromosomes and sex hormones influence development. Biological sex is determined by the father’s contribution to the twenty-third pair of chromosomes. The mother always contributes an X chromosome. The father may also contribute an X chromosome, producing a female, or a Y chromosome, producing a male by triggering additional testosterone release and the development of male sex organs. During puberty, both primary and secondary sex characteristics develop. Sex-related genes and physiology influence behavioral and cognitive differences between males and females. Disorders of sexual development are inherited conditions that involve unusual development of sex chromosomes and anatomy.

Gender roles, the behaviors a culture expects from its males and females, vary across place and time. Social learning theory proposes that we learn gender identity—our sense of being male, female, or some combination of the two—as we learn other things: through reinforcement, punishment, and observation. Critics argue that cognition also plays a role because modeling and rewards cannot explain gender typing. Some children organize themselves into “boy worlds” and “girl worlds”; others prefer androgyny. Transgender people’s gender identity or expression differs from their birth sex. Their sexual orientation may be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual.

Individual development results from the interaction of biological, psychological, and social-cultural influences. Biological influences include our shared human genome; individual variations; prenatal environment; and sex-related genes, hormones, and physiology. Psychological influences include gene-environment interactions; the effect of early experiences on neural networks; responses evoked by our own characteristics, such as gender and temperament; and personal beliefs, feelings, and expectations. Social-cultural influences include parental and peer influences; cultural traditions and values; and cultural gender norms.