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The Past Explains the Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments

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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 emotions and psychological disorders. Experts from a number of different disciplines—psychology, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, and more—tackle a variety of “how” (proximate) and “why” (ultimate) questions about the function of emotions in humans and nonhuman animals, how emotions work, and their place in human life. This volume documents the explosion of knowledge in emotion science over the last few decades, outlines important areas of future research, and highlights key questions that have yet to be answered.

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Until relatively recently, the study of victimization has been largely outside the purview of behavioral geneticists and evolutionary psychologists. Recent victimology research, however, has shown that genetic and evolutionary forces are connected to the risk of victimization. The current study expands on these findings by examining whether genetic influences differentially explain victimization in males and females. To do so, we use a sample of sibling pairs drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health; N = 4,244). The analyses revealed no significant quantitative sex differences in the etiology of adult victimization. However, the results of this study do highlight the importance of accounting for genetic factors when studying the etiology of specific types of adult victimization. We conclude by discussing the implications of the current study for future research.
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Background. The term “incel” (involuntary celibate) refers to the members of an online subculture, mainly composed of heterosexual men. These individuals find it difficult or impossible to have a romantic and/or sexual partner, and they express extreme anger and resentment toward women, as they hold them accountable for their “inceldom.” In recent years, online and offline acts of violence have been perpetrated by incels, raising concern at social and political levels. This study aims to understand the personal, psychological, and psychopathological variables that may contribute to developing incel traits. Materials and Methods. A total of 800 Italian heterosexual cisgender men were recruited by a link to the survey forwarded on social networks. Participants have completed a sociodemographic questionnaire and a set of psychometric tests to assess incels’ personality traits, attachment patterns, paranoia, anxiety, and depression. Results. Positive correlations among incel personality traits and psychopathological symptoms and insecure attachment were found. Hierarchical regression analysis showed the significant role of paranoid thinking, insecure attachment, depression, and anxiety symptoms in the presence of incels’ personality traits. Conclusion. Therefore, the assessment of these psychopathological aspects could help clinicians, parents, and teachers to early identify young males that can be caught in the inceldom and to develop specific intervention programs to prevent violence.
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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 human emotion. These include hypotheses about within-sex individual differences (in contrast to the historical emphasis on between-sex differences), hypotheses about within-individual shifts in jealousy over time, and hypotheses about the distinct tactics the jealousy system should deploy in response to different forms of relationship threat. Finally, the chapter emphasizes the need for more research on jealousy in relationships other than monogamous mating relationships, including consensually non-monogamous relationships as well as non-mating relationships. This chapter contributes novel theoretical insights and suggests future directions that can help generate new empirical discoveries about this important human emotion.
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What is the nature of human thought? A long dominant view holds that the mind is a general problem-solving device that approaches all questions in much the same way. Chomsky's theory of language, which revolutionised linguistics, challenged this claim, contending that children are primed to acquire some skills, like language, in a manner largely independent of their ability to solve other sorts of apparently similar mental problems. In recent years researchers in anthropology, psychology, linguistic and neuroscience have examined whether other mental skills are similarly independent. Many have concluded that much of human thought is 'domain-specific'. Thus, the mind is better viewed as a collection of cognitive abilities specialised to handle specific tasks than a general problem solver. This volume introduces a general audience to a domain-specificity perspective, by compiling a collection of essays exploring how several of these cognitive abilities are organised.
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Anthropologists have long recognized that cultural evolution critically depends on the transmission and generation of information. However, between the selection pressures of evolution and the actual behaviour of individuals, scientists have suspected that other processes are at work. With the advent of what has come to be known as the cognitive revolution, psychologists are now exploring the evolved problem-solving and information-processing mechanisms that allow humans to absorb and generate culture. The purpose of this book is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology, which supplied the necessary connection between the underlying evolutionary biology and the complex and irreducible social phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians.
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We have attempted four main tasks in this chapter. First, a systematic overview is given of the cognitive–phenomenological theory of emotions put forth by Lazarus and his colleagues. The concepts of cognitive appraisal, coping, and several key principles in the theory, including transaction and flux, are reviewed. Second, we offer a working definition of emotion which also serves to summarize the main tenets of the theoretical point of view. Third, we draw upon this point of view to deal with a number of phylogenetic issues concerning the nature of emotion in humans and infra-humans. Finally, we attempt to redress the traditional imbalance of thought in which positively toned emotions have been neglected in favor of the negative. We systematically examine some of the conceptual issues that have made it difficult to integrate positively toned emotions into emotion theory. In this discussion, emphasis is placed on the functions of physiological changes in positively toned emotions and on the ways that positively toned emotions affect coping. Throughout, our view has been that the neglect of positively toned emotions in emotion theory has obscured their importance in human adaptation and in psychological growth and change.
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This chapter sets out the principles of ethological study and contrasts it with those of neurophysiology and experimental psychology which have provided so much of the framework of thought for the study of emotion. It accepts the scheme proposed by R. Plutchik for defining the fundamental biological functions out of which the emotions arose, and shows how it is necessary to redefine some of these to bring them together with categories of social behavior derived from the essentially social nature of the primates. In particular, it relates emotions to two modes (the agonic and the hedonic) of mental operation uncovered by the study of the social structure of attention.
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Anthropologists have long recognized that cultural evolution critically depends on the transmission and generation of information. However, between the selection pressures of evolution and the actual behaviour of individuals, scientists have suspected that other processes are at work. With the advent of what has come to be known as the cognitive revolution, psychologists are now exploring the evolved problem-solving and information-processing mechanisms that allow humans to absorb and generate culture. The purpose of this book is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology, which supplied the necessary connection between the underlying evolutionary biology and the complex and irreducible social phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians.
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The concept of "emotion-as-motivation" is challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds and emotion as a response is offered as the alternative. Theoretical relations between the "intertwined concepts" of adaptation and emotion are discussed. Emotion is "said to flow from appraisal processes by which the person or infrahuman animal evaluated the adaptive significance of the stimulus." A review of empirical research on emotion involving appraisal and reappraisal of threat under laboratory conditions is presented. (132 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Contains research objectives. U. S. Air Force Contract AF19(604)-7459, monitored by Operations Analysis Office, Air Force Command and Control Development Division, Bedford, Massachusetts
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