Index IntroductionThe environment of a childThe nature of a childConclusionIntroductionOtis Toole was a notorious serial killer between 1961 and 1983, was he predisposed to become a murderer or c Were there any effects that led him to become a murderer? As a child, Toole was forced to suffer extensive abuse from his father and others, as well as being dressed as a girl and called Susan. The environment Tool lived in as a child played an important role in the transformation of the monster he would become as an adult. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Other serial killers grow up in a loving home and are natural killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer, their sinister tendencies do not stem from their stable homes. As we grow up, we acquire personality traits from our environment like Toole acquired his violent behavior from his father and we also develop natural instincts like Bundy and Dahmer. While most of us are not serial killers, we all establish our personalities somewhere. As a child you will acquire personality traits that you establish through your environment and combine them with those traits that are learned naturally. A Child's Environment John Watson, a widely known psychologist firmly believed that a child's environment and surroundings are the fuel for his personality and behavior. Watson would have believed that the product of your personality today was the result of your environment as a child. A child raised in a poor, abusive home would have several personality differences compared to a child raised in an upper class with supportive parents. Beth Thomas "The Child of Rage" experienced an abusive childhood early on, a childhood that led her to pick up on those offensive traits. At the age of one, Thomas was sexually abused by her birth father and was later removed from her home and placed with her adoptive family at the age of 19 months. At the age of six he still had vivid nightmares of what he had endured years earlier while living with his father. Following this sexual abuse, Thomas developed a turbulent personality as she would abuse her brother by molesting and hurting him, as well as hurting animals. Her adoptive mother stated that Beth masturbated at inappropriate times and on a daily basis. Thomas also admitted that he wanted to kill his adoptive parents and his brother, his parents would lock his bedroom door from the outside worried about what might happen if they didn't, as paring. knives would disappear from the kitchen (Ruiz, G. 2018, April 18). Thomas's angry personality might have been "normal" if he had not endured abuse from his father. B.F. Skinner developed the theory of operant conditioning in Discovering the Life Span which states that "operant conditioning is a form of learning in which a voluntary response is strengthened or weakened by its association with positive or negative consequences... individuals learn to operate on their environment to achieve desired consequences.” Thomas admits that he dislikes people, he associated the abuse he suffered from his father with other people, so his association with people was weakened you wish for death, allegedly inflicted pain on his brother, admitted to squeezing and touching his genitals. Thomas was also caught trying to slam his brother's head into the concrete floor of the basement in a fit of trying to kill him brother as he did with his father because he was of the family, male and had "partsintimate", then conducted numerous acts of torment on his brother, John. Thomas was conditioned to have negative thoughts towards his family, he said the thoughts came from his birth father hurting her and the thoughts were mainly forwarded to his brother Another theory that plays a role in Thomas' behavior is Sigmund Freud's psychosexual development, which he states in which a child's parents play a vital role in developing their sexual and aggressive tensions in their life by the fact that each stage of this theory had not been fulfilled correctly, resulting in her being fixated on aggression and sexual tendencies such as masturbation Beth Thomas was born into an unhealthy environment where she was conditioned into her violent traits and gave rise to his sinister personality. The nature of a child Nature is defined as “what we consider to be pre-wired and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors” ( Mcleod, S. 2018, December 20). A child may possess personality traits made up of his or her genetic code. Identical twins can tell us a lot about the genetic formation of our personality since they share the same genetic makeup. It has been shown in twin studies that when raised in different families, twins still show the same personality traits as if they had never been separated. This shows us that their personality was inherited and not due to the environment, in case the environment had played the most important role, those twins would have had completely different personalities. Eysenck's theory of personality predicts that one's personality is inherited and influences how one adapts and learns in one's environment. This theory would explain the study of when twins are separated but their personalities remain the same, the twins have inherited their personalities and are able to adapt and learn in their different environments in the same way. In comparison, another study was conducted on male twins separated at birth at four weeks. The two brothers were then reunited at thirty-nine years old and the similarities in their lives were incredible. Among the similarities, both men had been married to a woman named Linda and then divorced, had a pet named Toy, worked part-time in law enforcement, and both bit their nails. Even though all their life experiences were surprisingly similar during the personality test, the results differed greatly. This supports our idea that nature plays a role in personality to some extent but not entirely. These twins grew up in different families and showed by having the same experiences throughout their lives, which can still support our genetic information that influences why these twins had carbon copy lives, they made the same choices to bring them along such similar paths. We found that nature played a role in determining the personalities of these twins, but because their environments were different, their personalities were able to deviate from each other. Conclusion It is established that both nature and nurture play a vital role in determining one's personality. We found that Beth Thomas' environment played an important role in her aggressive personality, but it did not have the same effect on her brother John. We have found that when twins are separated they still show the same traits and experience life in the same way, as if their destiny is encoded within them. But does nature or nature play a more important role? Many psychologists believe that it is nature that.