[rescue] Re: OT: Clutter???-Answers!

[Michael Hansen]

Ok, here are the sophomore psych major answers.
(actually, I just make the questions more
complicated - If there are solid answers, no
can agree on what they are.)

This really should be on geeks, but I can't
resist. Erm... what about a
psych(ology)@sunhelp.org list? or maybe a
mentalhelp.org site?

>Really, though it's all about your personality, which may or
>may not be the same as your parents'.

Your personality, at least according to the
recent psych literature, is roughly 60%
determined by genetic factors - personality
wise, you ARE ~30% like each parent.

This also goes for aptitudes, intelligence by
most definitions,and mental health, eg.
probablilty of depression, anxiety, probably AD(H)D, some learning differences, and much,
much more.

The 40% not biologically determined by your
parent's DNA is determined by the environment
in which you live/have lived. A popular theory
here is that the sum of your experience - 
everything you have learned and felt, seen and
heard, shapes who you are. The degree and
manner of how experience shapes you is partially biological and partially how that
it is integrated or assimilated with
the experiences you have already had. This
line of thinking stems from work done by
Piaget in learning. 

Where does that leave us? There may well be
a gene for packratness, called "hording" by
psychologists. Hording could also be a learned
behavior, allowing it to be inherited by
observation rather than genetics. I would
place odds on it being both. 

>>Trust me, it's inherited.  I'm 50^H^H old enough to know better, and
>>my mother still insists on bringing me "stuff".

You are correct - it is obviously heritable,
but, as I mentioned above, the mechanism
is as yet unclear. Both of my grandmothers,
one aunt, my mother, my father, my sister
(not, interestingly, my brother, unless you
count his gun collection and hunting stuff) and
myself exhibit hording behaviors. 

I suppose being
>>some percentage classic Scottish may not help...never toss anything :-)

Ditto for the Irish, so far as I can tell.
One grandmother was pure Irish, the other
part Scottish.

>>> Question.. any packrats on this list? Do you come by your packratness
>>> honestly? was eg (like mine) your father or mother a packrat?.. is
>>> packratness learned or inheirited?

As above, it is inherited either as a learned
and modelled behavior, a genetic
predisposition, or both.

---
Mike Hansen, AC7UR



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