Evolutionary Psychology

A discipline that seeks to identify evolved emotional and cognitive adaptations of human psychology. Evolutionary psychology proposes psychological adaptations or evolved cognitive mecha nisms that emerged over the course of evolution through the process of natural selection to solve recurrent prob lems in human ancestral environments. Evolutionary psychologists propose that universal behaviors and emotions, such as fear of spiders and snakes, reflect these adaptations. Evolutionary psychology adheres to the main tenets of evolutionary theory, which maintain that traits appear through natural and sexual selection within an environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, via inclu sive fitness (e.g., mate selection). Essentially, this means that variation in genetics allows the selection of some organisms over others in a particular environment; those traits that make an organism best suited to the environ ment will be promulgated. Evolutionary psychologists argue that understanding the psychological functions of the human brain requires understanding of the prob lems that had to be overcome in the environment at the time in which humans evolved, generally accepted to be during the Pleistocene era. Evolutionary psychology pro poses that in Pleistocene environments, problems such as growth and development, survival, mating, and social relationships were resolved via the processes of natural and sexual selection.

Modern evolutionary psychology maintains that human psychology consists of a large number of functionally specialized mechanisms that produce manifest behavior and that this manifest behavior depends on underlying psychological mechanisms triggered by external and internal stimuli. Moreover, modern evolutionary psychology suggests that natural selection is the only identified causal process capable of creating these mechanisms and that psychological mechanisms are specialized to solve problems that recurred for humans over evolutionary time. Researchers in the field rely on comparative methods (e.g., human with nonhuman species, human with human in different contexts) as well as traditional experimentation to test evolutionary hypotheses. Methods of study include archaeological research, observation, and self-report.