Reprints are provided for scholarly purposes only. Permission to reprint any article must be sought from the holder of the copyright.
Scientists at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology specialize in finding new ways that an evolutionary perspective can inform research on the design of the human mind. In so doing, we have been researching many new topics, as well as trying out new approaches to old topics. Below we provide a partial list with links to some relevant research papers.
Principles of evolutionary psychology
Reasoning and rationality
Social exchange reasoning (reciprocation, reciprocal altruism, cooperation)
Judgment under uncertainty (intuitive statistics; optimal foraging; ecological rationality; heuristics & biases)
Emotions—What are they?
Emotion (emotions as super-ordinate programs solving the problem of mechanism coordination in a multimodular mind)
Emotions—Specific ones
Vision and Visual Attention
Visual attention–a system specialized for monitoring animals
Vision: Faces—the case for domain-specific object recognition
Evolutionary Biology
Evolutionary Biology: Intragenomic Conflict, Pathogens & the Evolution of Sexual Recombination; Banker’s Paradox (etc)
Literature and the Arts
Close social relationships
Kin detection (as regulator of incest avoidance; altruism)
Varieties of Cooperation
Two-person cooperation / reciprocation / reciprocal altruism
Cooperating in Groups:
Coalitional psychology and alliance detection
Adaptations for collective action
Memory
Memory (memory systems; specializations; personality trait database; self-knowledge, episodic memories; amnesia; memory loss )
Spatial cognition
Spatial adaptations for foraging (female advantage in location memory for plants; content effects; optimal foraging)
Tools: Cognitive foundations
Adaptations for tool use (the artifact concept and inferences about function; design stance; problem solving, dissociation between inferences about function and naming)
Personality
Personality (personality differences and universal human nature; adaptationist framework for personality science; cognitive systems specialized for encoding, storing, and retrieving knowledge of personality traits)
The links below are not live yet—hopefully I will be able to update them soon! LC
Darwinian medicine, Darwinian psychiatry
Economics, Business, and Organizational Behavior
Hazard Management (precautionary reasoning)
Culture
Intelligence (improvisational intelligence; dedicated intelligence; decoupled reasoning (counterfactual reasoning, suppositional reasoning, metarepresentation)
Theoretical foundations of psychology and the behavioral sciences
Environments of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA; Why the past explains the present)
