Evolutionary Psychology Insights Regarding Human Sexuality

Human evolutionary psychology and animal behaviour.

Homo sapiens is increasingly being studied within the evolutionary (adaptationist, selectionist) framework favoured by animal behaviour researchers. There are various labels for such work, including evolutionary psychology, human behavioural ecology and human sociobiology. Collectively, we call these areas 'human evolutionary psychology' (HEP) because their shared objective is an evolutionary u...

Evolutionary Versus Instrumental Goals: How Evolutionary Psychology Misconceives Human Rationality

An important research tradition in the cognitive psychology of reasoning-called the heuristics and biases approach-has firmly established that people's responses often deviate from the performance considered normative on many reasoning tasks. For example, people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of utili...

Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary developmental psychology: understanding the evolution of human behavior and development.

This is an introduction to this special issue on evolutionary psychology (EP) and evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP). We suggest here that, contrary to some common assumptions, mainstream psychology continues to be essentially non Darwinian and that EP and EDP are new approaches that can potentially help us to change this situation. We then present the organization of the special issue...

Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology

O16: How Do Concepts of Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychiatry Explain Anxiety Disorders?

Our ancestors without fear, worry and anxiety are not our ancestors, as organisms without defense systems were extinct. Therefore, while behavior such as fear and anxiety are useful to prevent harm, the exaggerated form, that is, anxiety disorders, has more costs than benefits. Likewise, while a panic attack is a normal and useful response in the face of life-threatening danger, a panic disorde...