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Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.
John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.
Aggression is a behavior aimed at opposing or attacking something or someone. Though often done with the intent to cause harm, it can be channeled into creative and practical outlets for some. It may occur either reactively or without provocation. In humans, aggression can be caused by various triggers. For example, built-up frustration due to blocked goals or perceived disrespect. Human aggression can be classified into direct and indirect aggression; while the former is characterized by physical or verbal behavior intended to cause harm to someone, the latter is characterized by behavior intended to harm the social relations of an individual or group.
A sexual fantasy or erotic fantasy is an autoerotic mental image or pattern of thought that stirs a person's sexuality and can create or enhance sexual arousal. A sexual fantasy can be created by the person's imagination or memory, and may be triggered autonomously or by external stimulation such as erotic literature or pornography, a physical object, or sexual attraction to another person. Anything that may give rise to sexual arousal may also produce a sexual fantasy, and sexual arousal may in turn give rise to fantasies.
Infidelity is a violation of a couple's emotional or sexual exclusivity that commonly results in feelings of anger, sexual jealousy, and rivalry.
David Cyril Geary is an American cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist with interests in mathematical learning and sex differences. He is currently a Curators’ Professor and Thomas Jefferson Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
Sex differences in psychology are differences in the mental functions and behaviors of the sexes and are due to a complex interplay of biological, developmental, and cultural factors. Differences have been found in a variety of fields such as mental health, cognitive abilities, personality, emotion, sexuality, friendship, and tendency towards aggression. Such variation may be innate, learned, or both. Modern research attempts to distinguish between these causes and to analyze any ethical concerns raised. Since behavior is a result of interactions between nature and nurture, researchers are interested in investigating how biology and environment interact to produce such differences, although this is often not possible.
Gordon G. Gallup Jr. is an American psychologist in the University at Albany's psychology department, researching biopsychology.
David Michael Buss is an American evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, researching human sex differences in mate selection. He is considered one of the founders of evolutionary psychology.
Sex differences in crime are differences between men and women as the perpetrators or victims of crime. Such studies may belong to fields such as criminology, sociobiology, or feminist studies. Despite the difficulty of interpreting them, crime statistics may provide a way to investigate such a relationship from a gender differences perspective. An observable difference in crime rates between men and women might be due to social and cultural factors, crimes going unreported, or to biological factors. The nature or motive of the crime itself may also require consideration as a factor. Gendered profiling might affect the reported crime rates.
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop: changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.
Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.
Anne C. Campbell was a British academic and author specializing in evolutionary psychology. Her research was largely concerned with sex differences in aggression between men and women. She was professor of psychology at Durham University.
Biosocial criminology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to explain crime and antisocial behavior by exploring biocultural factors. While contemporary criminology has been dominated by sociological theories, biosocial criminology also recognizes the potential contributions of fields such as behavioral genetics, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology.
The Evolution of Human Sexuality is a 1979 book about human sexuality by the anthropologist Donald Symons, in which the author discusses topics such as human sexual anatomy, ovulation, orgasm, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and rape, attempting to show how evolutionary concepts can be applied to humans. Symons argues that the female orgasm is not an adaptive trait and that women have the capacity for it only because orgasm is adaptive for men, and that differences between the sexual behavior of male and female homosexuals help to show underlying differences between male and female sexuality. In his view, homosexual men tend to be sexually promiscuous because of the tendency of men in general to desire sex with a large number of partners, a tendency that in heterosexual men is usually restrained by women's typical lack of interest in promiscuous sex. Symons also argues that rape can be explained in evolutionary terms and feminist claims that it is not sexually motivated are incorrect.
Vernon Lewis Quinsey is a Canadian psychologist. He has studied violent crime offenders, sex offenders, sexually violent predators, juvenile delinquency, and ways to predict, assess, and manage individuals with antisocial tendencies. He has used Darwinian theory to explain antisocial behavior and actuarial methods to predict it. In addition, he has extensively studied clinical judgment.
Sex differences in humans have been studied in a variety of fields. Sex determination generally occurs by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome in the 23rd pair of chromosomes in the human genome. Phenotypic sex refers to an individual's sex as determined by their internal and external genitalia and expression of secondary sex characteristics.
In evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology, human mating strategies are a set of behaviors used by individuals to select, attract, and retain mates. Mating strategies overlap with reproductive strategies, which encompass a broader set of behaviors involving the timing of reproduction and the trade-off between quantity and quality of offspring.
Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture. Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect.".
The evolutionary neuroandrogenic (ENA) theory is a conceptual framework which seeks to explain trends in violent and criminal behavior from an evolutionary and biological perspective. It was first proposed by the sociologist Lee Ellis in 2005 in his paper "A Theory Explaining Biological Correlates of Criminality" published in the European Journal of Criminology. Since then, it has expanded into an interdisciplinary field that intersects biology, psychology, and sociology. The theory rests on two propositions. The first is that in human mating behavior, females prefer males that appear to be more competent providers of resources, and so males exhibit increased competitive behavior than females to obtain access to those resources. The second is that biological mechanisms lead to differential development in the male brain which then mediates the increased competitive behaviors that cause criminality. Though it was originally intended to explain high rates of criminality in young men, it has since been used as a framework to explain gang behavior, terrorism, and the rise of the criminal justice system.
References
- 1 2 3 4 "Nigel Barber". Contemporary Authors. Gale. 2009.
- ↑ Keenan, John (December 7, 2016). "Where is the world's most 'godless' city?". The Guardian. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
- ↑ Dingfelder, Sadie (December 1, 2006). "Altruism: An accident of nature?". Monitor on Psychology. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
- ↑ Saxtin, Tamsin (April 19, 2016). "The real reason men grow beards". BBC Future. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
- ↑ Abrahams, Marc (June 4, 2012). "Men's facial hair: losing by a whisker". The Guardian. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
- ↑ "Nigel Barber: Religion Will Disappear By 2041". The Inquisitr. July 26, 2013. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
- ↑ Sheets, Connor Adams (July 24, 2013). "Author Claims 'Atheism Will Replace Religion' By 2041". International Business Times. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
