About the Book
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 114. Chapters: Adaptive behaviors, Agent detection, A Natural History of Rape, Biophilia hypothesis, Biosocial criminology, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Cinderella effect, Cognitive description, Cognitive module, Concealed ovulation, Criticism of evolutionary psychology, Darwinian literary studies, Dear enemy effect, Dunbar's number, Error management theory, Evolutionary aesthetics, Evolutionary approaches to depression, Evolutionary developmental psychology, Evolutionary developmental psychopathology, Evolutionary educational psychology, Evolutionary ethics, Evolutionary leadership theory, Evolutionary musicology, Evolutionary origin of religions, Evolutionary psychology of religion, Evolutionary psychology research groups and centers, Evolution of emotion, Evolution of morality, Fluctuating asymmetry, Folk biology, History of evolutionary psychology, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Human nature, Hunter vs. farmer hypothesis, Hypergamy, Imprinted brain theory, International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion, Just-so story, Media naturalness theory, Meme, Mental environment, Modularity of mind, Neuroculture, Polygyny threshold model, Psychological adaptation, Race, Evolution, and Behavior, Rank theory of depression, Reciprocal altruism, Religion Explained, Sexual jealousy, Sexual jealousy in humans, Sexual selection in human evolution, Sexy son hypothesis, Sociobiological theories of rape, Sperm competition, Standard social science model, Theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology, The Adapted Mind, The Blank Slate, Tinbergen's four questions, Trivers-Willard hypothesis, Why Is Sex Fun?. Excerpt: Evolutionary psychology (EP) is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations - that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the mind has a modular structure similar to that of the body, with different modular adaptations serving different functions. Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments. The adaptationist approach is steadily increasing as an influence in the general field of psychology. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that EP is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology but that evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that integrates the entire field of psychology, in the same way it has for biology. Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations including the abilities to infer others' emotions, discern kin from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, and cooperate with others. They report successful tests of theoretical predictions related to such topics as infanticide, intelligence, marriage patterns, promiscuity, perception of beauty, bride price, and parental investment. The theories and findings of EP have applications in many fields, including economics, environment, health, law, management, psychiatry, politics, and literature. Controversies concerning EP involve questions of testability, cognitive and evolutionary assumptions (such as modular fun
