clude the use of various drugs by the mother, such as alcohol, tobacco, and crack, or some sort of physical abuse to the mother during the pregnancy. Each one is capable of causing some sort of mental or physical handicap to the infant. Common sense tells you that this would affect the learning capability or the physical capability of the child, thus having a definite change on the outcome of that child’s personality. Physical attributes, mental attributes, and basic needs are all passed down from parent to child. The core personality is therefore made up of all of these factors that are determined by heredity. After birth, everything that is experienced by the individual has an effect on that person’s personality and is added onto the core personality and makes it much more complex as it continues to grow and mature. The Growth of Personality The core personality makes up the basis of an individual’s personality for the rest of that person’s life. Personality growth, therefore, takes place as new experiences are added to that core personality. These new experiences come directly from a person’s environment. The first environmental factors that affect personality have to so with social groups. All people have the basic need to form relationships, so it is not surprising that the joining of social groups has a profound impact on learning and the development of the core personality. The first social group that contributes to personality and behavior is one’s family, if you have one. A person’s parents are the first people that one learns from. Learning is accomplished through reinforcement and ideologies. To explain this way of learning we will look at a stereotypical family setting. An infant learns quite a bit from his family and uses that as the basis of most of it’s personality growth. From the time of birth, the individual is absorbing quite a bit of information from its surroundings. P...
