Personality differences and biological variations: a study of twins / by Gordon Claridge, Sandra Canter, and W.I. Hume.

  • Claridge, Gordon
Date:
[1973]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Personality differences and biological variations: a study of twins / by Gordon Claridge, Sandra Canter, and W.I. Hume. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE TWIN PROJECT By GORDON CLARIDGE The aims of the project It is natural to suppose that, given access as we were to a large sample of human twins, the main purpose in studying them would be to exploit their genetic uniqueness, collecting information on them which might throw light on the influence of heredity on certain defined characteristics, in our case behavioural and psychological characteristics. And indeed this was an important aim of the various studies brought together in the following chapters. However, none of the contributors to this book is a geneticist, nor even a psychologist particularly specialized in that branch of genetics, namely behaviour genetics or psychogenetics, which is most relevant to psychology. As experimental psychopatholo- gists we have been primarily concerned with establishing the scientific principles of personality, using a wide range of objective behavioural and physiological techniques. Most of our previous research on the problem has been focused on the abnormalities of behaviour observed in psychiatric patients (see Claridge, 1967). However, it is an assump¬ tion of our approach to personality that the characteristics observed and measured in the psychiatrically ill are merely exaggerated forms of those found running through the general population. The ready availability of a substantial number of psychiatrically well adults therefore allowed us to extend our research to the study of the normal personality, thus giving the project a second major purpose, namely the investigation of behaviour per se, irrespective of our subjects being twins. 1
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