Laith Al-Shawaf

University of Colorado-Colorado Springs · Psychology

Evolutionary approaches to the emotions have traditionally focused on a subset of emotions that are shared with other species, characterized by distinct signals, and designed to solve a few key adaptive problems. By contrast, an evolutionary psychological approach (a) broadens the range of adaptive problems emotions have evolved to solve, (b) inclu...

Significance Cross-cultural tests from 16 nations were performed to evaluate the hypothesis that the emotion of pride evolved to guide behavior to elicit valuation and respect from others. Ancestrally, enhanced evaluations would have led to increased assistance and deference from others. To incline choice, the pride system must compute for a potent...

According to the recalibrational theory of anger, anger is a computationally complex cognitive system that evolved to bargain for better treatment. Anger coordinates facial expressions, vocal changes, verbal arguments, the withholding of benefits, the deployment of aggression, and a suite of other cognitive and physiological variables in the servic...

The emerald-colored jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) parasitizes the common cockroach with a sophistication that beggars the imagination. Here’s how the morbid scene unfolds. The wasp begins by injecting a venomous compound into the roach’s body, temporarily paralyzing its victim. Next, it seeks out two specific areas of the roach’s brain, injecting...

In a multinational study (61 countries; N =15,039), we examined how collective narcissists, both agentic (ACN) and communal (CCN), reacted cognitively (through endorsement of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs) and behaviorally (via prevention, hoarding, and prosociality) to the pandemic. Higher ACN and CCN predicted greater endorsement of COV...

Ideal partner preferences (i.e., ratings of the desirability of attributes like attractiveness or intelligence) are the source of numerous foundational findings in the interdisciplinary literature on human mating. Recently, research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preference matching (i.e., Do people positively evaluate partners who mat...

A theoretical perspective on grandiose narcissism suggests four forms of it (sanctity, admiration, heroism, rivalry) and states that these forms conduce to different ways of thinking and acting. Guided by this perspective, we examined in a multinational and multicultural study (61 countries; N = 15,039) how narcissism forms are linked to cognitions...

Ideal partner preferences(i.e., ratings of the desirability of attributes like attractiveness or intelligence)are the source of numerous foundational findings in the interdisciplinary literature on human mating. Recently, research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preference-matching (i.e., do people positively evaluate partners who match...

This book provides a cutting-edge overview of emotion science from an evolutionary perspective. Part 1 outlines different ways of approaching the study of emotion; Part 2 covers specific emotions from an evolutionary perspective; Part 3 discusses the role of emotions in a variety of life domains; and Part 4 explores the relationship between emotion...

This book provides a cutting-edge overview of emotion science from an evolutionary perspective. Part 1 outlines different ways of approaching the study of emotion; Part 2 covers specific emotions from an evolutionary perspective; Part 3 discusses the role of emotions in a variety of life domains; and Part 4 explores the relationship between emotion...

This chapter seeks to invigorate work at the boundary of knowledge about jealousy. First, the chapter conducts a task analysis of the adaptive problem that jealousy is hypothesized to solve. This task analysis reveals key gaps in current knowledge about jealousy. Second, the chapter presents an array of new, testable hypotheses about this important...

This book provides a cutting-edge overview of emotion science from an evolutionary perspective. Part 1 outlines different ways of approaching the study of emotion; Part 2 covers specific emotions from an evolutionary perspective; Part 3 discusses the role of emotions in a variety of life domains; and Part 4 explores the relationship between emotion...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been conceptualized as the product of dysfunctional harm prevention systems accompanied by heightened negative emotions like disgust. However, models have not fully accounted for functional heterogeneity in OCD, such as the distinction between OCD subtypes (autogenous vs. reactive) and their differing profile...

Decarbonization policies are frequently combined with other policies to increase public support or address related societal issues. To investigate the consequences of policy bundling, we conducted a survey experiment with 2,521 U.S. adults. We examined the effects of bundling decarbonization with policies favored by liberals (social justice and eco...

Internet-based social engineering (SE) attacks are a major cyber threat. These attacks often serve as the first step in a sophisticated sequence of attacks that target, among other things, victims’ credentials and can cause financial losses. The problem has received mounting attention in recent years, with many publications proposing defenses again...

Interest in psychedelics and their possible therapeutic potential has been growing. Metaphysical belief theory asserts that these benefits stem from the adoption of comforting supernatural beliefs following a mystical experience. By contrast, predictive self-binding theory suggests that the beneficial outcomes of psychedelics are primarily driven b...

Levels of analysis are crucial to the progress of science. They frame the epistemological boundaries of a discipline, chart its explanatory goals, help scientists to avoid needless conflict, and highlight knowledge gaps. Two frameworks in particular, Tinbergen’s four questions from biology and Marr’s three levels from cognitive science, hold immens...

In recent years, researchers have discovered much about how disgust works, its neural basis, its relationship with immune function, its connection with mating, and some of its antecedents and consequents. Despite these advances in our understanding, an under-explored area is how disgust may be used to serve a communicative function, including how i...

We present an overview of the role, benefits, and drawbacks of theory in scientific research, particularly in the social and behavioral sciences. We discuss what theory is and what it is not. We also focus on some key elements of theory, such as its ability to explain phenomena at multiple parallel levels of analysis. Evolutionary theory is offered...

Antioxidant-rich plant extracts have demonstrated tremendous value as inflammatory modulators and as nanomaterial precursors. Chronic cigarette smoking alters neurotransmitter systems, particularly the glutamatergic system, and produces neuroinflammation. This study aimed to investigate the behavioral and molecular correlates of cigarette smoking w...

Semchenko and colleagues (in press) recently disentangled two evolutionary hypotheses and demonstrated that heterosexual men have mate preferences for both the morphological cue of women's lumbar curvature and the behavioral cue of back arching: Men are attracted to an intermediate degree of lumbar curvature in both shortterm and long-term mating c...

In 1753, artist William Hogarth declared a specific S-shaped line to be the ‘Line of Beauty’ (LoB). Hogarth’s assertion has had a profound impact on diverse fields over the past two and a half centuries. However, only one recent (2022) study has investigated whether Hogarth’s assertion accurately captures humans’ actual aesthetic preferences, and n...

In their commentary on our paper, Brandner et al. commit an elementary statistical mistake that leads to entirely erroneous conclusions. When this statistical error is corrected, the effects described in our original paper appear exactly as reported. In principle, we could end our reply there. However, ending our reply there would be a lost opportu...

Disgust is an emotion that regulates disease avoidance and reduces the likelihood of pathogenic infections. Existing research suggests a bidirectional relationship between disgust and mating, where disgust inhibits sexual behavior and sexual behavior inhibits disgust. In the current study, we investigated the role of individual differences and mati...

Evolutionary social science is having a renaissance. This volume showcases the empirical and theoretical advancements produced by the evolutionary study of romantic relationships. The editors assembled an international collection of contributors to trace how evolved psychological mechanisms shape strategic computation and behavior across the life s...

Due to the environmental benefits of entomophagy, a growing field of research is now investigating the factors that predict people's willingness to eat insects. In the current studies, we examined how willingness to eat insects may vary as a function of individual differences in disgust sensitivity, food neophobia, and hunger. We conducted two stud...

Ideal partner preferences (i.e., ratings of the desirability of attributes like attractiveness or intelligence) are the source of numerous foundational findings in the interdisciplinary literature on human mating. Recently, research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preference-matching (i.e., do people positively evaluate partners who mat...

Attractiveness is a perception produced by psychological mechanisms in the mind of the perceiver. Understanding attractiveness therefore requires an understanding of these mechanisms. This includes the selection pressures that shaped them and their resulting information-processing architecture, including the cues they attend to and the context-depe...

Despite progress in attractiveness research, we have yet to identify many fitness-relevant cues in the human phenotype or humans’ psychology for responding to them. Here, we test hypotheses about psychological systems that may have evolved to process distinct cues in the female lumbar region. The Fetal Load Hypothesis proposes a male preference for...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic social changes for many people, including separation from friends and coworkers, enforced close contact with family, and reductions in mobility. Here we assess the extent to which people's evolutionarily-relevant basic motivations and goals—fundamental social motives such as Affiliation and Kin Care—might have b...

In this study, we replicated what is known about the relative importance of dealbreakers (i.e., traits avoided) and dealmakers (i.e., traits sought) in romantic and sexual relationships and extended it to an examination of self-reports of mate value, self-esteem, and loneliness. In two experiments (N = 306; N = 304) we manipulated the information p...

Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun inves...

People across the world and throughout history have gone to great lengths to enhance their physical appearance. Evolutionary psychologists and ethologists have largely attempted to explain this phenomenon via mating preferences and strategies. Here, we test one of the most popular evolutionary hypotheses for beauty-enhancing behaviors, drawn from m...

People across the world and throughout history have gone to great lengths to enhance their physical appearance. Evolutionary psychologists and ethologists have largely attempted to explain this phenomenon via mating preferences and strategies. Here, we test one of the most popular evolutionary hypotheses for beauty-enhancing behaviors, drawn from m...

How does psychology vary across human societies? The fundamental social motives framework adopts an evolutionary approach to capture the broad range of human social goals within a taxonomy of ancestrally recurring threats and opportunities. These motives—self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and...

People across the world and throughout history have gone to great lengths to enhance their physical appearance. Evolutionary psychologists and ethologists have largely attempted to explain this phenomenon via mating preferences and strategies. Here, we test one of the most popular evolutionary hypotheses for beauty-enhancing behaviors, drawn from m...

Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration, and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun inve...

Social engineering attacks are a major cyber threat because they often serve as a first step for an attacker to break into an otherwise well-defended network, steal victims' credentials, and cause financial losses. The problem has received due amount of attention with many publications proposing defenses against them. Despite this, the situation ha...

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been a source of fear around the world. We asked whether the measurement of this fear is trustworthy and comparable across countries. In particular, we explored the measurement invariance and cross-cultural replicability of the widely used Fear of COVID-19 scale (FCV-19S), testing community samples from 48 countri...

Social emotions appear to be behavior-regulating programs built by natural selection to solve adaptive problems in the domain of social valuation-the disposition to attend to, associate with, defer to, and aid target individuals based on their probable contributions to the fitness of the valuer. For example, shame functions to prevent and mitigate...

Reliance on mutual aid is a distinctive characteristic of human biology. Consequently, a central adaptive problem for our ancestors was the potential or actual spread of reputationally damaging information about the self – information that would decrease the inclination of other group members to render assistance. The emotion of shame appears to be...

People must make inferences about a potential mate's desirability based on incomplete information. Under such uncertainty, there are two possible errors: people could overperceive a mate’s desirability, which might lead to regrettable mating behavior, or they could underperceive the mate’s desirability, which might lead to missing a valuable opport...

Researchers have long noted higher rates of schizophrenia among immigrants, although it's not clear why this is the case. One possibility is that there is something about the process of migration itself that causes increased rates of schizophrenia. Another possibility, referred to as selective migration, is that people who are predisposed to schizo...

COVID-19 has had a profound negative effect on many aspects of human life. While pharmacological solutions are being developed and implemented, the onus of mitigating the impact of the virus falls, in part, on individual citizens and their adherence to public health guidelines. However, promoting adherence to these guidelines has proven challenging...

Objective Mates high in physical attractiveness are in short supply, which means that not all people are able to find mates who are sufficiently attractive. Threshold models of mate preferences suggest that when physical attractiveness minimums are not reached, other traits possessed by a potential partner may play a lesser role in mate choice. How...

This study examines the development of children’s ability to modulate their trust in verbal testimony as a function of nonverbal behavior. Participants included 83 children (26 four-year-olds, 29 five-year-olds, and 28 six-year-olds) that were tasked with locating a toy hidden in one of two boxes. Before deciding the location, participants watched...

A common refrain in the social sciences is that evolutionary psychological hypotheses are “just-so stories.” Amazingly, no evidence is typically adduced for the claim—the assertion is usually just made tout court. The crux of the just-so charge is that evolutionary hypotheses are convenient narratives that researchers spin after the fact to accord...

This chapter describes the three products of evolution – adaptations, byproducts, and noise – along with subcategories of these umbrella terms. We discuss key features and misconceptions about each, as well as evidentiary criteria for distinguishing between them. Our discussion includes examples from biology and psychology and from both human and n...

The cognitive revolution reshaped our understanding of psychology by considering the mind as an assemblage of information-processing mechanisms. A central proposition of this computational theory of mind was that, to understand human behavior, we must attend to the information-processing mechanisms responsible for producing it. Despite the indispen...

People glean key information about their potential mates during the early phases of courtship. Here (N = 261) we investigated how much learning “dealmaker” (i.e., positive) and “dealbreaker” (i.e., negative) information changed men and women's interest in potential romantic partners. We derived hypotheses from prospect theory and error management t...

Cross-cultural research on long-term mate preferences in Muslim-majority countries is scarce. The research described here aims to examine the KASER (kindness/dependability, attractiveness/sexuality, status/resources, education/intelligence, and religiosity/chastity) model of mate preferences in Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey (N = 1,089). We examined st...

Cross-cultural research on long-term mate preferences in Muslim-majority countries is scarce. The research described here aims to examine the KASER (kindness/dependability, attractiveness/sexuality, status/resources, education/intelligence, and religiosity/chastity) model of mate preferences in Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey ( N = 1,089). We examined s...

Short-term mating strategies involve casual sex, multiple partners, and short-time intervals before initiating intercourse. Such strategies should be difficult to implement in the presence of high levels of sexual disgust. Researchers have therefore suggested—and found evidence for—the hypothesis that individuals with a stronger proclivity for shor...

Evolutionary approaches to psychology hold the promise of revolutionizing the field and unifying it with the biological sciences. But among both academics and the general public, a few key misconceptions impede their application to psychology and behavior. This essay tackles the most pervasive of these.

Historically, psychology has been characterized by a dichotomy between branches that focus on human nature and those that focus on individual differences. Initial “grand theories” of personality, such as those advanced by Freud, Maslow, and others, were interested in universal psychological features. For Freud, the emphasis was on sexual and aggres...

Mate retention and competitor derogation are two key components of human mate competition. In a conservative, religious sample from Pakistan (N = 255), the current study investigated evolutionarily informed hypotheses regarding a) sex differences in competitor derogation and mate retention, b) the relationship between mate value and mate retention...

Consciousness-altering behavior is, to a first approximation, a universal phenomenon; practically all human societies have experimented with altered states of consciousness (ASC) in some form. In this article, we review the neuroscientific and psychological evidence in favor of the transient hypofrontality theory (THT), a general brain mechanism th...

Despite the widespread use of high-heeled footwear in both developing and modernized societies, we lack an understanding of this behavioral phenomenon at both proximate and distal levels of explanation. The current manuscript advances and tests a novel, evolutionarily anchored hypothesis for why women wear high heels, and provides convergent suppor...

Women have consistently higher levels of disgust than men. This sex difference is substantial in magnitude, highly replicable, emerges with diverse assessment methods, and affects a wide array of outcomes—including job selection, mate choice, food aversions, and psychological disorders. Despite the importance of this far-reaching sex difference, so...

Burkart et al.'s impressive synthesis will serve as a valuable resource for intelligence research. Despite its strengths, the target article falls short of offering compelling explanations for the evolution of intelligence. Here, we outline its shortcomings, illustrate how these can lead to misguided conclusions about the evolution of intelligence,...

Researchers in the social and behavioral sciences are increasingly using evolutionary insights to test novel hypotheses about human psychology. Because evolutionary perspectives are relatively new to psychology and most researchers do not receive formal training in this endeavor, there remains ambiguity about “best practices” for implementing evolu...

Integrating evolutionary psychological and molecular genetic research may increase our knowledge of the psychological correlates of specific genes, as well as enhance evolutionary psychology's ability to explain individual differences. We tested the hypothesis that men's sexual jealousy mechanisms functionally calibrate their psychological output a...

Error management theory is an important and fruitful scientific theory. However, it might be useful to revisit the way we conceptualize the commitment skepticism bias and the sexual overperception bias to improve their consistency with the core logic of the theory. In this paper, I advance a novel view that allows for the possibility of a male comm...

The current study tested the hypotheses that (1) psychological adaptations calibrate Openness to Experience to facilitate or deter pursuit of short-term mating, and (2) this calibration varies as a function of mating strategy, physical attractiveness, and sex—individual differences that shift the costs and benefits of alternative personality strate...

This paper reports independent studies supporting the proposal that human standards of attractiveness reflect the output of psychological adaptations to detect fitness-relevant traits. We tested novel a priori hypotheses based on an adaptive problem uniquely faced by ancestral hominin females: a forward-shifted center of mass during pregnancy. The...

An evolutionary perspective yields fresh insights into the nature of human friendships and the emotions associated with these relationships. This approach sheds light on how specific types of friendship would have benefited ancestral humans in the currency of natural selection—reproductive success—as well as in the currency of subjective well-being...

An evolutionary task analysis predicts a connection between disgust and human mating, two important but currently disconnected areas of psychology. Because short-term mating strategies involve sex with multiple partners after brief temporal durations, such a strategy should be difficult to pursue in conjunction with high levels of sexual disgust. O...

a b s t r a c t In selecting opposite-sex friends (OSFs), men prioritize physical attractiveness, whereas women prioritize physical prowess and economic resources. This parallel with mate preferences suggests mating mecha-nisms may partially drive OSF preferences. Selection would have favored activation of mating mecha-nisms when the probabilistic...

An evolutionary perspective predicts that the intensity of the disgust response should depend on the ancestral costs and benefits of coming into contact with disease vectors. Previous research advanced the compensatory behavioral prophylaxis hypothesis: progesterone-induced immunosuppression should be accompanied by increased disgust and contaminan...

During human evolution, men and women faced distinct adaptive problems, including pregnancy, hunting, childcare, and warfare. Due to these sex-linked adaptive problems, natural selection would have favored psychological mechanisms that oriented men and women toward forming friendships with individuals possessing characteristics valuable for solving...

The target article provides important theoretical contributions to psychology and Bayesian modeling. Despite the article's excellent points, we suggest that it succumbs to a few misconceptions about evolutionary psychology (EP). These include a mischaracterization of evolutionary psychology's approach to optimality; failure to appreciate the centra...