Parent Trap: A Psychological Analysis

The Parent Trap, a classic movie about two twin sisters who meet each other unexpectedly and try to push their divorced parents back into being one family again. While the story makes for an entertaining movie, does this phenomenon happen in real life? This movie and when I first learned about the value monozygotic twins had in the world psychology piqued my interest in this topic. How much can identical twins who have grown up apart from each other tell us about human nature and environmental impact? Beginning with the first pair of twins who started this line of research and going through several case studies, their findings, and also some critiques about the processes will be examined in this paper. In 1979, the media was buzzing with

Through reading many publish case studies like the ones provided earlier, Joseph (2001) thinks that researchers need to publish more of their raw data instead of only providing summarized versions of their results. Withholding any kind of information in a study is definitely unethical in any field of research based science and taking steps to improve the availability of data is only going to be beneficial. In addition, there might be a more suitable control group alternative that is not being properly utilized in twin studies. Normally researchers use dizygotic twins as a point of comparison in the similarities found in monozygotic twins; however, there may be a reason to change. The replacement control group proposed is a completely biologically unrelated pair of strangers whose age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, cultural background, and appearance are similar (Joseph, 2001). This situation would be extremely similar to that of reared-apart monozygotic twins except for the fact that their biology is not a 100% match. Even after improving the methods of twin studies there is still the huge hurdle of finding a true pair of reared-apart twins. For example, some pairs might play down the true amount of time they were in contact with each other to seem more interesting, some twins knew about their lost pair, some may have

MISTRA gave rise to the popularity of examining twins and has led to learning more about our relationship with genetics and the environment. However, the circumstances are not as clean as the movies want you to believe. Critics take on an important role when they can objectively take a step back and analyze the case for what it truly is while suggesting points of caution and areas that need improvements. Overall, there is still a need to continue these types of studies to determine the full extent of nature versus