Evolutionary psychology has rapidly developed into a multidisciplinary integrative research framework within which cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, cultural anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, paleoanthropologists, hunter-gatherer researchers, primatologists, developmental psychologists, social psychologists, behavioral ecologists, and others are communicating and collaborating about issues of mutual relevance. The UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology brings together research teams with expertise in these fields to identify and progressively map (1) the recurrent adaptive problems and selection pressures our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced, (2) the cognitive modules and emotion programs that evolved to solve these problems, (3) the neural implementation of these mechanisms, (4) how these specialized mechanisms systematically pattern individual behavior and social interactions, and (5) how these mechanisms regulate transmission of cultural representations from mind to mind, generating and shaping culture.
Research approaches pursued by Center affiliates include:
Laboratory-based cognitive experimentation
Field studies of tribal and foraging peoples
Psychophysiology
Cross-cultural experimentation and observation
Cognitive neuroscience
Social psychological and survey methods
Developmental studies
Theoretical biology
Hunter-gatherer archaeology
UCSB Scientists affiliated with the Center are currently investigating:
Reasoning instincts: modules functionally specialized for reasoning about cooperation, exchange, threat, hazard avoidance, groups, and sharing
The functional design of emotions such as love, jealousy and disgust
The adaptive organization of the evolved modules of social cognition
Individual and group status and its cognitive basis
The investigation of human psychological universals
Mate choice, attractiveness, and human sexuality
Mechanisms for incest avoidance
Coalitional psychology and ethnocentrism
Violence, intergroup conflict and war
Judgment under uncertainty and decision-making specializations designed to reflect the ecological structure of the world
Foraging adaptations
Communicative functions of facial expression
Evolved inference engines for modeling the physical, biological, animate, and social worlds
Memory, inference, and the dynamics of cultural transmission
The Center for Evolutionary Psychology is in the Humanities and Social Sciences Building, room 1010, at the University of California, Santa Barbara
