Animals have heightened perception when it comes to feeling effects such as pain, danger, or failure. The avoidance of these threats, increases the chances of suvival and thus that the animal passes on its genes. 

Bad is felt more than good

The sustaining of life. From an evolutionary perspective, living beings adapt to survive to live long enough to reproduce and pass on their genes. Animals develop advantageous behaviors to achieve this goal.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Syracuse University

Evolutionary psychology makes predictions about numerous areas of human behavior. Key domains of study include memory, mate choice, kinship dynamics, friendship and cooperation, parenting, social organization, and status. These areas are investigated to understand how certain behaviors may have evolved as adaptations.

Areas of Focus in Evolutionary Psychology

Aronson, Elliot, and Joshua Aronson. The Social Animal. Worth Publishers, Macmillan Learning, 2018.

The Social Animal

Survival (Evolutionary Psychology)

Evolutionary theories suggest discrete modules of emotion developed over time. These emotions have characteristics of good/bad and weak/strong which help perform functions that help facilitate or weaken our chances of survival.

Evolutionary Theories of Emotions

Sexual reproduction is the means by which genes are propagated into future generations, meaning sexual selection plays a large role in human evolution. Human mating, then, is of interest to evolutionary psychologists who aim to investigate evolved mechanisms to attract and secure mates. Several lines of research have stemmed from this interest, such as studies of mate selection, mate poaching, mate retention, mating preferences, and conflict between the sexes.

Mating

Reproduction is always costly for women, and can also be for men. Individuals are limited in the degree to which they can devote time and resources to producing and raising their young, and such expenditure may also be detrimental to their future condition, survival and further reproductive output. Parental investment is any parental expenditure (time, energy etc.) that benefits one offspring at a cost to parents' ability to invest in other components of fitness. Components of fitness include the well-being of existing offspring, parents' future reproduction, and inclusive fitness through aid to kin. 

Parenting

From the gene's point of view, evolutionary success ultimately depends on leaving behind the maximum number of copies of itself in the population. A gene can also increase its evolutionary success by promoting the reproduction and survival of these related or otherwise similar individuals. This leads natural selection to favor organisms that would behave in ways that maximize their inclusive fitness. It is also true that natural selection favors behavior that maximizes personal fitness. There is substantial evidence that humans act generally more altruistically to close genetic kin compared to genetic non-kin

Family and Kinship

Human reactions, modes of thinking and intuitions are dependent on the "domain" (setting and context) of the event/object. We use different mental machinery ("modules") in different situations (there is no all-purpose computing mechanism in the brain)

Domain Specificity

Although interactions with non-kin are generally less altruistic compared to those with kin, cooperation can be maintained with non-kin via mutually beneficial reciprocity.

Interactions with Non-Kin

Considerable work has been done on how evolutionary 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 (but by no means the only) 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."

Cultural Evolution

Using the principles that guide the study of behavior from a biological and historical perspective, propose an explanation for the phenomenon described in the case study below.

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