Frei, A., Erenay, N., Dittmann, V. & Graf, M. (2005). Paedophilia on the internet: A study of 33 convicted offenders in the Canton of Lucerne. Swiss Medical Weekly, 135, 488-494.

Background: The connection between the consumption of pornography and “contact-crimes” is unclear. The Internet has facilitated the mass consumption of pornography in general and specifically illegal pornography such as child pornography. In 1999, the owners of “Landslide Production Inc.”, an international provider of child-pornography in the USA were arrested and the credit-card-numbers of their clients were put at the disposal of the law enforcement agencies of the countries concerned.
Methods: Roughly 1300 Swiss citizens were subsequently arrested in the course of the nationwide action “Genesis”. In the canton of Lucerne33 men were identified. The police-files of these men were screened for psychosocial, criminological and psychosexual data.
Results: Most of these middle-aged men held comparatively elevated professional positions, only ten were married, eleven had never had an intimate relationship to a woman, and only thirteen of them had children. Only one of them had a relevant criminal record. The level of abuse depicted in the illegal material was high, all but one consumed pornography from other fields of sexual deviation. The personal statements of the offenders in general were hardly reliable, in three cases, however, the diagnosis of sexual deviation could be established from the files. The estimated time some of the offenders must have spent online in order to retrieve the material allows the diagnosis of Pathological Internet-Use.
Conclusions: Deviant sexual fantasies seem to be widespread also among men otherwise not registered for any offences. The consumption of even particularly disgusting material may not be a specific risk factor for “contact” crimes.

http://www.smw.ch/docs/pdf200x/2005/33/smw-11095.pdf

I’m not sure what category this would be placed in – maybe “paedophilia” and “Internet Use” under Social Psychology?

Urry, H.L., van Reekum, C.M., Johnstone, T., Kalin, N.H., Thurow, M.E., Schaefer, H.S., Jackson, C.A., Frye, C.J., Greischar, L.L., Alexander, A.L., & Davidson, R.J. (2006). Amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex are inversely coupled during regulation of negative affect and predict the diurnal pattern of cortisol secretion among older adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4415-4425.

Among younger adults, the ability to willfully regulate negative affect, enabling effective responses to stressful experiences, engages regions of prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdala. Because regions of PFC and the amygdala are known to influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, here we test whether PFC and amygdala responses during emotion regulation predict the diurnal pattern of salivary cortisol secretion. We also test whether PFC and amygdala regions are engaged during emotion regulation in older (62- to 64-year-old) rather than younger individuals. We measured brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging as participants regulated (increased or decreased) their affective responses or attended to negative picture stimuli. We also collected saliva samples for 1 week at home for cortisol assay. Consistent with previous work in younger samples, increasing negative affect resulted in ventral lateral, dorsolateral, and dorsomedial regions of PFC and amygdala activation. In contrast to previous work, decreasing negative affect did not produce the predicted robust pattern of higher PFC and lower amygdala activation. Individuals demonstrating the predicted effect (decrease

Ryff, C.D., Love, G.D., Urry, H.L., Muller, D.H., Rosenkranz, M.A., Friedman, E., Davidson, R.J., & Singer, B. (2006). Psychological well-being and ill-being: Do they have distinct or mirrored biological correlates? Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 75, 85-95.

Background: Increasingly, researchers attend to both positive and negative aspects of mental health. Such dis-
tinctions call for clarifi cation of whether psychological well-being and ill-being comprise opposite ends of a bi-
polar continuum, or are best construed as separate, independent dimensions of mental health. Biology can help resolve this query – bipolarity predicts ‘mirrored’ biological correlates (i.e. well-being and ill-being correlate similarly with biomarkers, but show opposite directional signs), whereas independence predicts ‘distinct’
biological correlates (i.e. well-being and ill-being have different biological signatures). Methods: Multiple as-
pects of psychological well-being (eudaimonic, hedonic) and ill-being (depression, anxiety, anger) were assessed
in a sample of aging women (n = 135, mean age = 74) on whom diverse neuroendocrine (salivary cortisol, epi-
nephrine, norepinephrine, DHEA-S) and cardiovascular factors (weight, waist-hip ratio, systolic and diastolic
blood pressure, HDL cholesterol, total/HDL cholesterol, glycosylated hemoglobin) were also measured. Results:
Measures of psychological well-being and ill-being were signifi cantly linked with numerous biomarkers, with
some associations being more strongly evident for respondents aged 75+. Outcomes for seven biomarkers
supported the distinct hypothesis, while findings for only two biomarkers supported the mirrored hypothesis.
Conclusion : This research adds to the growing literature on how psychological well-being and mental maladjust-
ment are instantiated in biology. Population-based in-quiries and challenge studies constitute important future
directions.

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Urry, H. L., Nitschke, J. B., Dolski, I., Jackson, D. C., Dalton, K. M., Mueller, C. J., Rosenkranz, M. A., Ryff, C. D., Singer, B. H., & Davidson, R. J. (2004). Making a life worth living: Neural correlates of well-being. Psychological Science, 15, 367-372.

Despite the vast literature that has implicated asymmetric activation of the prefrontal cortex in approach-with-drawal motivation and emotion, no published reports have directly explored the neural correlates of well-being. Eighty-four right-handed adults (ages 57–60) completed self-report measures of eudaimonic well-being, hedonic well-being, and positive affect prior to resting electroencephalography. As hypothesized, greater left than right superior frontal activation was associated with higher levels of both forms of well-being. Hemisphere-specific analyses documented the importance of goal-directed approach tendencies beyond those captured by approach-related positive affect for eudaimonic but not for hedonic well-being. Appropriately engaging sources of appetitive motivation, characteristic of higher left than right baseline levels of pre-frontal activation, may encourage the experience of well-being.

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Jackson, D.C., Mueller, C., Dolski, I., Dalton, K., Nitschke, J.B., Urry, H.L., Rosenkranz, M.A., Ryff, C., Singer, B., & Davidson, R.J. (2003). Now you feel it, now you don’t: Frontal EEG asymmetry and individual differences in emotion regulation. Psychological Science 14, 612-617.

Recent theoretical accounts of emotion regulation assign an important role in this process to the prefrontal cortex, yet there is little relevant data available to support this hypothesis. The current study assessed the relation between individual differences in asymmetric prefrontal activation and an objective measure of uninstructed emotion regulation. Forty-seven participants 57 to 60 years old viewed emotionally arousing and neutral visual stimuli while eye-blink startle data were collected. Startle probes were also presented after picture presentation to capture the persistence or attenuation of affect following the offset of an emotional stimulus. Subjects with greater relative left-sided anterior activation in scalp-recorded brain electrical signals displayed attenuated startle magnitude after the offset of negative stimuli. This relation between resting frontal activation and recovery following an aversive event supports the idea of a frontally mediated mechanism involved in one form of automatic emotion regulation.

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Allen, J. J. B., Urry, H. L., Hitt, S. K., Coan, J. A. (2004). The stability of resting frontal electroencephalographic asymmetry in depression. Psychophysiology, 41, 269-280.

Although resting frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha asymmetry has been shown to be a stable measure over time in nonclinical populations, its reliability and stability in clinically depressed individuals has not been fully
investigated. The internal consistency and test–retest stability of resting EEG alpha (8–13 Hz) asymmetry were examined in 30 women diagnosed with major depression at 4-week intervals for 8 or 16 weeks. Asymmetry scores
generally displayed good internal consistency and exhibited modest stability over the 8- and 16-week assessment
intervals. Changes in asymmetry scores over this interval were not significantly related to changes in clinical state.
These findings suggest that resting EEG alpha asymmetry can be reliably assessed in clinically depressed populations. Furthermore, intraclass correlation stability estimates suggest that although some traitlike aspects of alpha asymmetry exist in depressed individuals, there is also evidence of changes in asymmetry across assessment occasions that are not closely linked to changes in depressive severity.

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Kashdan, T. B., & McKnight, P. E. (2010). The darker side of social anxiety: When aggressive impulsivity prevails over shy inhibition. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 47-50.

The majority of definitions, research studies, and treatment programs that focus on social anxiety characterize the prototypical person with the disorder as shy, submissive, inhibited, and risk averse. This stereotype, however, has been challenged recently. Specifically, a subset of people with social anxiety who are aggressive, impulsive novelty seekers deviate from that prototype. People with this atypical profile show greater functional impairment and are less likely to complete or fare well in treatment compared with inhibited socially anxious people. The difference between these two groups of people with social anxiety cannot be explained by the severity, type, or number of social fears, nor by co-occurring anxiety and mood disorders. Conclusions about the nature, course, and treatment of social anxiety may be compromised by not attending to diverse behaviors and self-regulatory styles. These concerns may be compounded in neurobiological and clinical studies of people with social anxiety problems that rely on smaller samples to make claims about brain patterns and the efficacy of particular treatments.

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Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30, 865-878.

Traditionally, positive emotions and thoughts, strengths, and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for belonging, competence, and autonomy have been seen as the cornerstones of psychological health. Without disputing their importance, these foci fail to capture many of the fluctuating, conflicting forces that are readily apparent when people navigate the environment and social world. In this paper, we review literature to offer evidence for the prominence of psychological flexibility in understanding psychological health. Thus far, the importance of psychological flexibility has been obscured by the isolation and disconnection of research conducted on this topic. Psychological flexibility spans a wide range of human abilities to: recognize and adapt to various situational demands; shift mindsets or behavioral repertoires when these strategies compromise personal or social functioning; maintain balance among important life domains; and be aware, open, and committed to behaviors that are congruent with deeply held values. In many forms of psychopathology, these flexibility processes are absent. In hopes of creating a more coherent understanding, we synthesize work in emotion regulation, mindfulness and acceptance, social and personality psychology, and neuropsychology. Basic research findings provide insight into the nature, correlates, and consequences of psychological flexibility and applied research provides details on promising interventions. Throughout, we emphasize dynamic approaches that might capture this fluid construct in the real-world.

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Kashdan, T. B., Ferssizidis, P., Collins, R. L., & Muraven, M. (2010). Emotion differentiation as resilience against excessive alcohol use: An ecological momentary assessment in underage social drinkers. Psychological Science, 21, 1341-1347.

Some people are adept at using discrete emotion categories (anxious, angry, sad) to capture their felt experience; other people merely communicate how good or bad they feel. We theorized that people who are better at describing their emotions might be less likely to self-medicate with alcohol. During a 3-week period, 106 underage social drinkers used handheld computers to self-monitor alcohol intake. From participants’ reported experiences during random prompts, we created an individual difference measure of emotion differentiation. Results from a 30-day timeline follow-back revealed that people with intense negative emotions consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions and less reliant on global descriptions. Results from ecological momentary assessment procedures revealed that people with intense negative emotions prior to drinking episodes consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions. These findings provide support for a novel methodology and dimension for understanding the influence of emotions on substance-use patterns.

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McCullough, M. E., Kimeldorf, M. B., & Cohen, A. D. (2008). An adaptation for altruism? The social causes, social effects, and social evolution of gratitude. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 281-284.

ABSTRACT—People feel grateful when they have benefited from someone’s costly, intentional, voluntary effort on
their behalf. Experiencing gratitude motivates beneficiaries to repay their benefactors and to extend generosity
to third parties. Expressions of gratitude also reinforce benefactors for their generosity. These social features
distinguish gratitude from related emotions such as happiness and feelings of indebtedness. Evolutionary theories
propose that gratitude is an adaptation for reciprocal altruism (the sequential exchange of costly benefits between
nonrelatives) and, perhaps, upstream reciprocity (a pay-it-forward style distribution of an unearned benefit to a
third party after one has received a benefit from another benefactor). Gratitude therefore may have played a
unique role in human social evolution. Robert Trivers, have apprehended the importance of gratitude
for creating and sustaining positive social relations (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006; Harpham, 2004; McCullough, Kilpatrick, Emmons, & Larson, 2001). Oddly, though, psychological science largely neglected gratitude until the 21st century. Fortunately, recent research has explored gratitude’s distinct social causes and effects. These studies may help to shed light on gratitude’s evolutionary history.

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Bono, G. & McCullough M. E. (2006). Positive responses to benefit and harm: Bringing forgiveness and gratitude into cognitive psychotherapy. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 20, 147-158.

Forgiveness and gratitude represent positive psychological responses to interpersonal harms and benefits that individuals have experienced. In the present article we first provide a brief review of the research that has shown forgiveness and gratitude to be related to various measures of physical and psychological well-being. We then review the empirical findings regarding the cognitive and affective substrates of forgiveness and gratitude. We also offer a selective review of some of the interventions that appear to be effective in encouraging forgiveness
and gratitude. To conclude, we suggest some ways in which the insights from the basic research on promoting forgiveness and gratitude might be meaningfully integrated into cognitive psychotherapy.

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Polak, E., & McCullough, M. E. (2006). Is gratitude an alternative to materialism? Journal of Happiness Studies, 7, 343-360.

ABSTRACT. Materialistic strivings have been implicated as a cause of unhappiness. Gratitude, on the other hand – both in its manifestations as a chronic affective trait and as a more temporary emotional experience – may be
a cause of happiness. In the present paper we review the empirical research on the relationships among materialism, gratitude, and well-being. We present new correlational data on the gratitude–materialism relationship and propose that gratitude may have the potential to reduce materialistic strivings and consequently diminish the negative effects of materialistic strivings on psy- chological well-being. We conclude with some recommendations for future research on the relationships among gratitude, materialism, and well-being.

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McCullough, M. E., Tsang, J., & Emmons, R. A. (2004). Gratitude in intermediate affective terrain: Links of grateful moods to individual differences and daily emotional experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 295-309.

Two studies were conducted to explore gratitude in daily mood and the relationships among various affective manifestations of gratitude. In Study 1, spiritual transcendence and a variety of positive affective traits were related to higher mean levels of gratitude across 21 days. Study 2 replicated these findings and revealed that on days when people had more grateful moods than was typical for them, they also reported more frequent daily episodes of grateful emotions, more intense gratitude per episode, and more people to whom they were grateful than was typical for them. In addition, gratitude as an affective trait appeared to render participants’ grateful moods somewhat resistant to the effects of discrete emotional episodes of gratitude.

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Kendler, K., Liu, X., Gardner, C. O., McCullough, M. E., & Prescott, C. A. (2003). Dimensions of religiosity and their relationship to lifetime psychiatric and substance abuse disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 496-503.

Objective: The role of religion in mental illness remains understudied. Most prior investigations of this relationship have used measures of religiosity that do not reflect its complexity and/or have examined a small number of psychiatric outcomes. This study used data from a general population sample to clarify the dimensions of religiosity and the relationships of these dimensions to risk for lifetime psychiatric and substance use disorders. Method: Responses to 78 items assessing various aspects of broadly defined religiosity were obtained from 2,616 male and female twins from a general population registry. The association between the resulting religiosity dimensions and the lifetime risk for nine disorders assessed at personal interview was evaluated by logistic regression. Of these disorders, five were internalizing (major depression, phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and bulimia nervosa), and four were externalizing (nicotine dependence, alcohol dependence, drug abuse or dependence, and adult antisocial behavior). Results: Seven factors were identified: general religiosity, social religiosity, involved God, forgiveness, God as judge, unvengefulness, and thankfulness. Two factors were associated with reduced risk for both internalizing and externalizing disorders (social religiosity and thankfulness), four factors with reduced risk for externalizing disorders only (general religiosity, involved God, forgiveness, and God as judge), and one factor with reduced risk for internalizing disorders only (unvengefulness). Conclusions: Religiosity is a complex, multidimensional construct with substantial associations with lifetime psychopathology. Some dimensions of religiosity are related to reduced risk specifically for internalizing disorders, and others to reduced risk specifically for externalizing disorders, while still others are less specific in their associations. These results do not address the nature of the causal link between religiosity and risk for illness.

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McCullough, M. E., Kilpatrick, S. D., Emmons, R. A., & Larson, D. B. (2001). Is gratitude a moral affect? Psychological Bulletin, 127, 249-266.

Gratitude is conceptualized as a moral affect that is analogous to other moral emotions such as empathy and guilt. Gratitude has 3 functions that can be conceptualized as morally relevant: (a) a moral barometer function (i.e., it is a response to the perception that one has been the beneficiary of another person’s moral actions); (b) a moral motive function (i.e., it motivates the grateful person to behave prosocially toward the benefactor and other people); and (c) a moral reinforcer function (i.e., when expressed, it encourages benefactors to behave morally in the future). The personality and social factors that are associated with gratitude are also consistent with a conceptualization of gratitude as an affect that is relevant to people’s cognitions and behaviors in the moral domain.

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Williams, L. E., Huang, J. Y., & Bargh, J. A. (2000). The scaffolded mind: Higher mental processes are grounded in early experience of the physical world. European Journal of Social Psychology. 39, 1257–1267.

It has long been a staple of psychological theory that early life experiences significantly shape the adult’s understanding of and reactions to the social world. Here we consider how early concept development along with evolved motives operating early in life can come to exert a passive, unconscious influence on the human adult’s higher-order goal pursuits, judgments, and actions. In particular, we focus on concepts and goal structures specialized for interacting with the physical environment (e.g., distance cues, temperature, cleanliness, and self-protection), which emerge early and automatically as a natural part of human development and evolution. It is proposed that via the process of scaffolding, these early sensorimotor experiences serve as the foundation for the later development of more abstract concepts and goals. Experiments using priming methodologies reveal the extent to which these early concepts serve as the analogical basis for more abstract psychological concepts, such that we come easily and naturally to speak of close relationships, warm personalities, moral purity, and psychological pain. Taken together, this research demonstrates the extent to which such foundational concepts are capable of influencing people’s information processing, affective judgments, and goal pursuit, oftentimes outside of their intention or awareness.

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Williams, L. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Keeping one’s distance: The influence of spatial distance cues on affect and evaluation. Psychological Science, 19, 302-308.

Current conceptualizations of psychological distance (e.g., construal-level theory) refer to the degree of overlap between the self and some other person, place, or point in time. We propose a complementary view in which
perceptual and motor representations of physical distance influence people’s thoughts and feelings without reference to the self, extending research and theory on the effects of distance into domains where construal-level theory is silent. Across four experiments, participants were primed with either spatial closeness or spatial distance by plotting an assigned set of points on a Cartesian coordinate plane. Compared with the closeness prime, the distance prime produced greater enjoyment of media depicting embarrassment (Study 1), less emotional distress from violent media (Study 2), lower estimates of the number of calories in unhealthy food (Study 3), and weaker reports of emo- tional attachments to family members and hometowns (Study 4). These results support a broader conceptualization of distance-mediated effects on judgment and affect.

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Williams, L. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science, 322, 606-607.

“Warmth” is the most powerful personality trait in social judgment, and attachment theorists have stressed the importance of warm physical contact with caregivers during infancy for healthy relationships in adulthood. Intriguingly, recent research in humans points to the involvement of the insula in the processing of both physical temperature and interpersonal warmth (trust) information. Accordingly, we hypothesized that experiences of physical warmth (or coldness) would increase feelings of interpersonal warmth (or coldness), without the person’s awareness of this influence. In study 1, participants who briefly held a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee judged a target person as having a “warmer” personality (generous, caring); in study 2, participants holding a hot (versus cold) therapeutic pad were more likely to choose a gift for a friend instead of for themselves.

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Huang, J. Y., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Peak of desire: Activating the mating goal changes life-stage preferences across living kinds. Psychological Science, 19, 573-578.

In three studies, we explored the existence of an evolved sensitivity to the peak that would be consistent with the evolutionary origins of many basic human preferences. Activating the evolved motive of mating activates related adaptive mechanisms, including a general sensitivity to cues of growth and decay associated with determining mate value in human courtship. These studies show that priming the mating goal also activates an evaluative bias that influences how people evaluate cues of growth. Specifically, living kinds that are immature or past their prime are devalued, whereas living kinds that are at their peak become increasingly valued. Study 1 establishes this goal-driven effect for human stimuli indirectly related to the mating goal. Studies 2 and 3 establish that the evaluative bias produced by the activated mating goal extends to living kinds, but not artifacts.

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Harris, J. L., Bargh, J. A., & Brownell, K. D. (2009). Priming effects of television food advertising on eating behavior. Health Psychology, 28, 404-413.

Objective: Health advocates have focused on the prevalence of advertising for calorie-dense low-nutrient foods as a significant contributor to the obesity epidemic. This research tests the hypothesis that exposure to food advertising during TV viewing may also contribute to obesity by triggering automatic snacking of available food. Design: In Experiments 1a and 1b, elementary-school-age children watched a cartoon that contained either food advertising or advertising for other products and received a snack while watching. In Experiment 2, adults watched a TV program that included food advertising that promoted snacking and/or fun product benefits, food advertising that promoted nutrition benefits, or no food advertising. The adults then tasted and evaluated a range of healthy to unhealthy snack foods in an apparently separate experiment. Main Outcome Measures: Amount of snack foods consumed during and after advertising exposure. Results: Children consumed 45% more when exposed to food advertising. Adults consumed more of both healthy and unhealthy snack foods following exposure to snack food advertising compared to the other conditions. In both experiments, food advertising increased consumption of products not in the presented advertisements, and these effects were not related to reported hunger or other conscious influences. Conclusion: These experiments demonstrate the power of food advertising to prime auto-
matic eating behaviors and thus influence far more than brand preference alone.

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Fitzsimons, G. M., & Bargh, J. A. (2003). Thinking of you: Nonconscious pursuit of interpersonal goals associated with relationship partners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 148-164.

The mere psychological presence of relationship partners was hypothesized to trigger interpersonal goals that are then pursued nonconsciously. Qualitative data suggested that people tend to pursue different interpersonal goals within different types of relationships (e.g., mother, best friend, coworker). In several studies, priming participants’ relationship representations produced goal-directed behavior (achievement, helping, understanding) in line with the previously assessed goal content of those representations. These findings support the hypothesis that interpersonal goals are component features of relationship representations and that mere activation of those representations, even in the partner’s physical absence, causes the goals to become active and to guide behavior nonconsciously within the current situation.

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Bargh, J. A., & Morsella, E. (2008). The unconscious mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 73-79.

The unconscious mind is still viewed by many psychological scientists as the shadow of a ‘‘real’’ conscious mind, though there now exists substantial evidence that the unconscious is not identifiably less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than is its counterpart. This ‘‘conscious-centric’’ bias is due in
part to the operational definition within cognitive psychology that equates unconscious with subliminal. We re-
view the evidence challenging this restricted view of the unconscious emerging from contemporary social cognition
research, which has traditionally defined the unconscious in terms of its unintentional nature; this research has
demonstrated the existence of several independent unconscious behavioral guidance systems: perceptual, evaluative, and motivational. From this perspective, it is concluded that in both phylogeny and ontogeny, actions of
an unconscious mind precede the arrival of a conscious mind—that action precedes reflection.

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Bargh, J. A., Gollwitzer, P. M., Lee-Chai, A. Y., Barndollar, K., & Troetschel, R. (2001). The automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1014-1027.

It is proposed that goals can be activated outside of awareness and then operate nonconsciously to guide self-regulation effectively (J. A. Bargh, 1990). Five experiments are reported in which the goal either to perform well or to cooperate was activated, without the awareness of participants, through a priming manipulation. In Experiment 1 priming of the goal to perform well caused participants to perform comparatively better on an intellectual task. In Experiment 2 priming of the goal to cooperate caused participants to replenish a commonly held resource more readily. Experiment 3 used a dissociation paradigm to rule out perceptual-construal alternative explanations. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that action guided by nonconsciously activated goals manifests two classic content-free features of the pursuit of consciously held goals. Nonconsciously activated goals effectively guide action, enabling adaptation to ongoing situational demands.

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Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-244.

The extent to which one’s own thought and behavior are or are not under one’s own intentionalcontrol is a fundamental existential question (see Posner & Snyder, 1975; Uleman & Bargh, 1989). Indeed, over the past two decades, researchers in the area of attitudes and social cognition have documented that many of the phenomena they study are unintentional or automatic innature (for reviews, see Bargh, 1994; Smith, 1994, in press; Wegner & Bargh, in press).Attitudes are discovered to become activated automatically on the mere presence of the attitudeobject, without conscious intention or awareness (i.e., preconsciously; see Bargh, 1989), to thenexert their influence on thought and behavior (Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, & Hymes, 1996; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986). The self- concept (Bargh, 1982; Bargh & Tota, 1988; Higgins, 1987; Strauman & Higgins, 1987) is shownto become active automatically on the presence of self-relevant stimuli to affect self-perceptionand emotions. Stereotypes become active automatically on the mere presence of physicalfeatures associated with the stereotyped group (Brewer, 1988; Devine, 1989; Perdue & Gurtman, 1990; Pratto & Bargh, 1991), and categorizing behavior in terms of personality traits (e.g.,Carlston & Skowronski, 1994; Winter & Uleman, 1984) and then making dispositional attributions about the actor’s personality (e.g., Gilbert, 1989; Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988)have both been shown to occur automatically to some extent.

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Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479.

What was noted by E. J. hanger (1978) remains true today:that much of contemporary psychological research is basedon the assumption that people are consciously and system-atically processing incoming information in order to con-strue and interpret their world and to plan and engage incourses of action. As did E. J. hanger, the authors questionthis assumption. First, they review evidence that the abilityto exercise such conscious, intentional control is actuallyquite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psycho-logical life must occur through nonconscious means if it isto occur at all. The authors then describe the differentpossible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmen-tal control over these various phenomena and review evi-dence establishing both the existence of these mechanismsas well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, andbehavior. Three major forms of automatic self-regulationare identified: an automatic effect of perception on action,automatic goal pursuit, and a continual automatic evalu-ation of one’s experience. From the accumulating evi-dence, the authors conclude that these various noncon-scious mental systems perform the lion’s share of theself-regulatory burden, beneficently keeping the individualgrounded in his or her current environment.

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Bargh, J. A. (2006). What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 147-168.

Priming or nonconscious activation of social knowledge structures has produced a plethora of rather amazing findings over the past 25 years: priming a single social concept such as aggressive can have multiple effects across a wide array of psychological systems, such as perception, motivation, behavior, and evaluation. But we may have reached childhood’s end, so to speak, and need now to move on to research questions such as how these multiple effects of single primes occur (the generation problem); next, how these multiple simultaneous priming influences in the environment get distilled into nonconscious social action that has to happen serially, in real time (the reduction problem). It is suggested that models of complex conceptual structures (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), language use in real-life conversational settings (Clark, 1996), and speech production (Dell, 1986) might hold the key for solving these two important ‘second-generation’ research problems.

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Berkowitz, L, & LePage, A. (1967). Weapons as Aggression-Eliciting Stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7, 202-207.

TESTED THE HYPOTHESIS THAT STIMULI COMMONLY ASSOCIATED WITH AGGRESSION CAN ELICIT AGGRESSIIVE RESPONSES FROM PEOPLE READY TO ACT AGGRESSIVELY. 100 MALE UNIVERSITY SS RECEIVED EITHER 1 OR 7 SHOCKS, SUPPOSEDLY FROM A PEER, AND WERE THEN GIVEN AN OPPORTUNITY TO SHOCK THIS PERSON. IN SOME CASES A RIFLE AND REVOLVER WERE NEAR THE SHOCK KEY. THESE WEAPONS WERE SAID TO BELONG, OR NOT TO BELONG, TO THE AVAILABLE TARGET PERSON. IN OTHER INSTANCES THERE WAS NOTHING NEAR THE KEY, WHILE FOR CONTROLS 2 BADMINTON RACQUETS WERE NEAR THE KEY. THE GREATEST NUMBER OF SHOCKS WAS GIVEN BY THE STRONGLY AROUSED SS (WHO HAD RECEIVED 7 SHOCKS) WHEN THEY WERE IN THE PRESENCE OF THE WEAPONS. THE GUNS HAD EVIDENTLY ELICITED STRONG AGGRESSIVE RESPONSES FROM THE AROUSED MEN.

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Zimbardo, P. (2004). A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil: Understanding how Good People are Transformed into Perpetrators. In Miller, A. G. (Ed.) pp 21-50, The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, New York: Guilford.

I endorse a situationist perspective on the ways in which anti-social behavior by individuals, and of violence sanctioned by nations, is best understood, treated and prevented. This view has both influenced and been informed by a body of social psychological research and theory. It contrasts with the traditional dispositional perspective to explaining the whys of evil behavior. The search for internal determinants of anti-social behavior locates evil within individual predispositions – genetic “bad seeds,” personality traits, pathological risk factors, and other organismic variables. The situationist approach is to the dispositional as public health models of disease are to medical models. It follows basic principles of Lewinian theory that propel situational determinants of behavior to a foreground well beyond being merely extenuating background circumstances. Unique to this situationist approach is using experimental laboratory and field research as demonstrations of vital phenomena that other approaches only analyze verbally or rely on archival or correlational data for answers. The basic paradigm to be presented illustrates the relative ease with which “ordinary,” good men and women are induced into behaving in evil ways by turning on or off one or another social situational variable.

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Eagly, A, & Steffen, V. J. (1986). Gender and Aggressive Behavior: A Meta-analytic Review of the Social Psychological Literature. Psychological Bulletin, 100, 309-330.

In our meta-analytic review of sex differences in aggressive behavior reported in the social psychological literature we found that although men were somewhat more aggressive than women on the average, sex differences were inconsistent across studies. The magnitude of the sex differences was significantly related to various attributes of the studies. In particular, the tendency for men to aggress more than women was more pronounced for aggression that produces pain or physical injury than for aggression that produces psychological or social harm. In addition, sex differences in aggressive behavior were larger to the extent that women, more than men, perceived that enacting a behavior would produce harm to the target, guilt and anxiety in oneself, as well as danger to oneself. Our interpretation of these results emphasizes that aggression sex differences are a function of perceived consequences of aggression that are learned as aspects of gender roles and other social roles.

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Berkowitz, L. (1989). The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: An Examination and Reformulation. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 59-73.

Examines the Dollard et al. (1939) frustration-aggression hypothesis. The original formulation’s main proposition is limited to interference with an expected attainment of a desired goal on hostile (emotional) aggression. Although some studies have yielded negative results, others support the core proposition. Frustrations can create aggressive inclinations even when they are not arbitrary or aimed at the subject personally. Interpretations and attributions can be understood partly in terms of the original analysis but they can also influence the unpleasantness of the thwarting. A proposed revision of the 1939 model holds that frustrations generate aggressive inclinations to the degree that they arouse negative affect. Evidence regarding the aggressive consequences of aversive events is reviewed, and Berkowitz’s cognitive-neoassociationistic model is summarized.

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Niemiec, C. P., Brown, K. W., Kashdan, T. B., Cozzolino, P. J., Breen, W., Levesque, C., & Ryan, R. M. (2010). Being present in the face of existential threat: The role of trait mindfulness in reducing defensive responses to mortality salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 344-365.

Terror management theory posits that people tend to respond defensively to reminders of death, including
worldview defense, self-esteem striving, and suppression of death thoughts. Seven experiments examined
whether trait mindfulness—a disposition characterized by receptive attention to present experience—reduced
defensive responses to mortality salience (MS). Under MS, less mindful individuals showed higher worldview
defense (Studies 1–3) and self-esteem striving (Study 5), yet more mindful individuals did not defend a
constellation of values theoretically associated with mindfulness (Study 4). To explain these findings through
proximal defense processes, Study 6 showed that more mindful individuals wrote about their death for a longer
period of time, which partially mediated the inverse association between trait mindfulness and worldview
defense. Study 7 demonstrated that trait mindfulness predicted less suppression of death thoughts immediately
following MS. The discussion highlights the relevance of mindfulness to theories that emphasize the nature
of conscious processing in understanding responses to threat.

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Aron, A., Steele, J., Kashdan, T.B., & Perez, M. (2006). When similars don’t attract: Tests of a prediction from the self-expansion model. Personal Relationships, 13, 387-396.

This study tested the hypothesis from the self-expansion model that the usual effect of greater attraction to a similar (vs. dissimilar) stranger will be reduced or reversed when a person is given information that a relationship would be likely to develop (i.e., that they would be very likely to get along) with the other person. The study employed the ‘‘bogus stranger’’ paradigm and focused on similarity/dissimilarity of interests in the context of attraction to a same-gender other. The effect for similarity under conditions in which no information is given about relationship likelihood replicated the usual pattern of greater attraction to similars. However, as predicted, a significant similarity by information interaction demonstrated that this effect was significantly reduced (and slightly reversed) when participants had been given information that the partner will like self. In analyses for each gender separately, both of these effects were significant only for men, suggesting that the focus on interest similarity may have been less relevant for women.

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Kashdan, T. B., Uswatte, G., & Julian, T. (2006). Gratitude and hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in Vietnam War veterans. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44, 177-199.

Little information exists on the contribution of psychological strengths to well-being in persons with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Data from other populations suggest that gratitude, defined as the positive experience of thankfulness for being the recipient of personal benefits, may have salutary effects on everyday functioning. We investigated whether dispositional gratitude predicted daily hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in combat veterans with and without PTSD.We also examined associations between daily gratitude and daily well-being across time. Veterans with PTSD, compared to those without PTSD, exhibited significantly lower dispositional gratitude; no differences were found on daily gratitude. Dispositional gratitude predicted greater daily positive affect, percentage of pleasant days over the assessment period, daily intrinsically motivating activity, and daily self-esteem over and above effects attributable to PTSD severity and dispositional negative and positive affect in the PTSD group but not the non-PTSD group. Daily gratitude was uniquely associated with each dimension of daily well-being in both groups. Although preliminary, these results provide support for the further investigation of gratitude in trauma survivors.

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Kashdan, T. B., Julian, T., Merritt , K., & Uswatte, G. (2006). Social anxiety and posttraumatic stress in combat veterans: Relations to well-being and character strengths. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44, 561-583.

There are few studies examining the relationship between psychopathology and positive experiences and traits. Although initial studies suggest persons with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are at increased risk for excessive social anxiety, there have been no studies to date evaluating how these conditions might interact to affect positive experiences and traits. Using self-report scales, informant ratings, and experience sampling methodologies, we examined the association of social anxiety with well-being and character strengths in veterans with and without PTSD. Controlling for PTSD and trait negative affect, social anxiety was negatively related to global ratings of well-being and character strengths. Social anxiety also accounted for incremental variance in day-to-day well-being (i.e., daily affect balance, percentage of pleasant days, positive social activity, self-esteem, gratitude) over a 14-day assessment period. Although veterans with PTSD reported lower levels of global and daily well-being and character strengths than veterans without PTSD, a diagnosis of PTSD failed to exhibit unique relationships with these constructs. Building on a growing body of work, these data suggest that social anxiety is uniquely associated with disturbances in positive experiences, events, and traits. Our findings support the value of directly addressing social anxiety in the study and treatment of PTSD.

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Kashdan, T. B., & Steger, M. (2006). Expanding the topography of social anxiety: An experience sampling assessment of positive emotions and events, and emotion suppression. Psychological Science, 17, 120-128.

The relation between social anxiety and hedonic activity remains poorly understood. From a self-regulatory
perspective, we hypothesized that socially anxious individuals experience diminished positive experiences
and events on days when they are unable to manage socially anxious feelings adequately. In this 21-day experience-sampling study, we constructed daily measures of social anxiety and emotion regulation. Greater dispositional social anxiety was associated with less positive affect and fewer positive events in everyday life. Among individuals defined as socially anxious from their scores on a global self-report measure of social anxiety, the number of positive events was lowest on days when they both were more socially anxious and tended to suppress emotions and highest on days when they were less socially anxious and more accepting of emotional experiences. Irrespective of dispositional social anxiety, participants reported the most intense positive emotions on the days when they were both least socially anxious and most accepting of emotional experiences. Possible clinical implications are discussed.

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Kashdan, T.B., & Breen, W.E. (2007). Materialism and diminished well-being: Experiential avoidance as a mediating mechanism. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 26, 521-539.

Being preoccupied with the pursuit of money, wealth, and material possessions arguably fails as a strategy to increase pleasure and meaning in life. However, little is known about the mechanisms that explain the inverse relation between materialism and well-being. The current study tested the hypothesis that experiential avoidance mediates associations between materialistic values and diminished emotional well-being, meaning in life, self-determination, and gratitude. Results indicated that people with stronger materialistic values reported more negative emotions and less relatedness, autonomy, competence, gratitude, and meaning in life. As expected, experiential avoidance fully mediated all associations between materialistic values and each dimension of well-being. Emotional disturbances such as social anxiety and depressive symptoms failed to account for these findings after accounting for shared variance with experiential avoidance. The results are discussed in the context of alternative, more fulfilling routes to well-being.

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Kashdan, T. B. & Yuen, M. (2007). Whether highly curious students thrive academically depends on the learning environment of their school: A study of Hong Kong adolescents. Motivation and Emotion, 31, 260-270.

The present study tested whether the perceived academic values of a school moderate whether highly curious students thrive academically. We investigated the interactive effects of curiosity and school quality on academic success for 484 Hong Kong high school students. Chinese versions of the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory, Subjective Happiness Scale, and Rosenberg Self-Esteem scales were administered and shown to have acceptable measurement properties. We obtained Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE) scores (national achievement tests) from participating schools. Results yielded Trait Curiosity · Perceived School Quality interactions in predicting HKCEE scores and school grades. Adolescents with greater trait curiosity in more challenging schools had the greatest academic success; adolescents with greater trait curiosity in less challenging schools had the least academic success. Findings were not attributable to subjective happiness or self-esteem and alternative models involving these positive attributes were not supported. Results suggest that the benefits of curiosity are activated by student beliefs that the school environment supports their values about growth and learning; these benefits can be disabled by perceived person-environment mismatches.

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Kashdan, T. B. & Steger, M. F. (2007). Curiosity and pathways to well-being and meaning in life: Traits, states, and everyday behaviors. Motivation and Emotion, 31, 159-173.

This study examined curiosity as a mechanism for achieving and maintaining high levels of well-being
and meaning in life. Of primary interest was whether people high in trait curiosity derive greater well-being on
days when they are more curious. We also tested whether trait and daily curiosity led to greater, sustainable wellbeing. Predictions were tested using trait measures and 21 daily diary reports from 97 college students. We found that on days when they are more curious, people high in trait curiosity reported more frequent growth-oriented behaviors, and greater presence of meaning, search for meaning, and life satisfaction. Greater trait curiosity and greater curiosity on a given day also predicted greater persistence of meaning in life from one day into the next. People with greater trait curiosity reported more frequent hedonistic events but they were associated with less pleasure compared to the experiences of people with less trait curiosity. The benefits of hedonistic events did not last beyond the day of their occurrence. As evidence of construct specificity, curiosity effects were not attributable to Big Five personality traits or daily positive or negative mood. Our results provide support for curiosity as an ingredient in the development of well-being and meaning in life. The pattern of findings casts doubt on some distinctions drawn between eudaimonia and hedonic well-being traditions.

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Kashdan, T. B., & Roberts, J. E. (2004). Trait and state curiosity in the genesis of intimacy: Differentiation from related constructs. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23, 792-816.

We examined the roles of curiosity, social anxiety, and positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in the development of interpersonal closeness. A reciprocal self–disclosure task was used wherein participants and trained confederates asked and answered questions escalating in personal and emotional depth (mimicking closeness–development). Relationships between curiosity and relationship outcomes were examined using regression analyses. Controlling for trait measures of social anxiety, PA, and NA, trait curiosity predicted greater partner ratings of attraction and closeness. Social anxiety moderated the relationship between trait curiosity and self–ratings of attraction such that curiosity was associated with greater attraction among those low in social anxiety compared to those high in social anxiety. In contrast, trait PA was related to greater self–ratings of attraction but had no relationship with partners’ ratings. Trait curiosity predicted positive relationship outcomes as a function of state curiosity generated during the interaction, even after controlling for state PA.

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Murphy, D., & Stich, S. (2000). Darwin in the madhouse: evolutionary psychology and the classification of mental disorders. In P. Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (Eds.), Evolution and the human mind: Modularity, language and meta-cognition (pp. 62–92). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Recent years have witnessed a ground swell of interest in the application of evolutionary theory to issues in psychopathology (Nesse & Williams 1995, Stevens & Price 1996, McGuire & Troisi 1998). Much of this work has been aimed at finding adaptationist explanations for a variety of mental disorders ranging from phobias to
depression to schizophrenia. There has, however, been relatively little discussion of the implications that the theories proposed by evolutionary psychologists might have for the classification of mental disorders. This is the theme we propose to explore. We’ll begin, in Section 1, by providing a brief overview of the account of the mind advanced by evolutionary psychologists. In Section 2 we’ll explain why issues of taxonomy are important and why the dominant approach to the classification of mental disorders is radically and alarmingly unsatisfactory. We will also indicate why we think an alternative approach, based on theories in evolutionary psychology, is particularly promising. In Section 3 we’ll try to illustrate some of the virtues of the evolutionary psychological approach to classification. The discussion in Section 3 will highlight a quite fundamental distinction between those disorders that arise from the malfunction of a component of the mind and those that can be traced to the fact that our minds must now function in environments that are very different from the environments in which they evolved. This mismatch between the current and ancestral environments can, we maintain, give rise to serious mental disorders despite the fact that, in one important sense, there is nothing at all wrong with the people suffering the disorder. Their minds are functioning exactly as Mother Nature intended them to. In Section 4, we’ll give a brief overview of
some of the ways in which the sorts of malfunctions catalogued in Section 3 might arise, and sketch two rather different strategies for incorporating this etiologically information in a system for classifying mental disorders. Finally, in Section 5, we will explain why an evolutionary approach may lead to a quite radical revision in the classification of certain conditions. From an evolutionary perspective, we will argue, some of the disorders
recognized in standard manuals like DSM-IV may turn out not to be disorders at all. The people who have these conditions don’t have problems; they just cause problems!

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Peterson, C., Park, N., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: The full life versus the empty life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6, 25–41.

Different orientations to happiness and their association with life satisfaction were investigated with 845 adults responding to Internet surveys. We measured life satisfaction and the endorsement of three different ways to be happy through pleasure, through engagement, and through meaning. Each of these three orientations individually predicted life satisfaction. People simultaneously low on all three orientations reported especially low life satisfaction. These findings point the way toward a distinction between the full life and the empty life.

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Kashdan, T. B. (2007). Social anxiety spectrum and diminished positive experiences: Theoretical synthesis and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 27, 348-365.

Until recently, there has been limited recognition that diminished positive psychological experiences are important to understanding the nature of social anxiety. Meta-analytic techniques were used to evaluate the strength, consistency, and construct specificity of relations between the social anxiety spectrum with positive affect and curiosity. The social anxiety spectrum had significant inverse relations with positive affect (r=.36; 95% CI: .31 to .40) and curiosity (r=.24; 95% CI: .20 to – .28). Relations between social anxiety and positive affect were stronger in studies sampling from clinical populations. Specificity findings (e.g., statistically controlling for depressive symptoms and disorders) further confirmed negative associations with positive affect (r=.21; 95% CI: .16 to .26) and curiosity (r=.21; 95% CI: .08 to .32). The literature on social rank, selfpresentation concerns, self-regulatory resources, and experiential avoidance is reviewed and integrated to elaborate a framework of how, why, and when social anxiety may be inversely related to positive experiences. The specificity of theory and data to social interaction anxiety is supported by an examination of existing work on social performance/observation fears and other anxiety conditions. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of diminished positive psychological experiences in understanding excessive social anxiety.

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Kashdan, T. B., Biswas-Diener, R., & King, L. A. (2008). Reconsidering happiness: The costs of distinguishing between hedonics and eudaimonia. Journal of Positive Psychology, 3, 219-233.

In recent years, well-being researchers have distinguished between eudaimonic happiness (e.g., meaning and
purpose; taking part in activities that allow for the actualization of one’s skills, talents, and potential) and
hedonic happiness (e.g., high frequencies of positive affect, low frequencies of negative affect, and evaluating life
as satisfying). Unfortunately, this distinction (rooted in philosophy) does not necessarily translate well to science.
Among the problems of drawing too sharp a line between ‘types of happiness’ is the fact that eudaimonia is not
well-defined and lacks consistent measurement. Moreover, empirical evidence currently suggests that hedonic and
eudaimonic well-being overlap conceptually, and may represent psychological mechanisms that operate together.
In this article, we outline the problems and costs of distinguishing between two types of happiness, and provide
detailed recommendations for a research program on well-being with greater scientific precision.

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Silvia, P. J., & Kashdan, T. B. (2009). Interesting things and curious people: Exploration and engagement as transient states and enduring strengths. Social Psychology and Personality Compass, 3, 785-797.

Curiosity, interest, and intrinsic motivation are critical to the development of competence, knowledge, and expertise. Without a mechanism of intrinsic motivation, people would rarely explore new things, learn for its own sake, or engage with uncertain tasks despite feelings of confusion and anxiety. This article explores two sides of interest: momentary feelings (the emotion of interest) and enduring traits (the character strength of curiosity). Recent theories in emotion psychology can explain why and when people experience feelings of interest; recent research has illuminated the role of curiosity in cultivating knowledge, meaning in life, close relationships, and
physical and mental resilience. The problem for future research – and for social and personality psychology more generally – is how to bridge the dynamics of everyday experience with stable, lifespan aspects of personality.

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Kashdan, T.B., & McKnight, P.E. (2009). Origins of purpose in life: Refining our understanding of a life well lived. Psychological Topics, 18, 303-316.

Purpose can be characterized as a central, self-organizing life aim. Central in that when present, purpose is a predominant theme of a person’s identity. Self-organizing in that it provides a framework for systematic behavior patterns in everyday life. As a life aim, a purpose generates continual goals and targets for efforts to be devoted. A purpose provides a bedrock foundation that allows a person to be more resilient to obstacles, stress, and strain. In this paper, we outline a theoretical model of purpose development. Besides outlining various essential ingredients to creating a purpose in life, we describe three broad pathways. The first process is proactive involving effort over time and only resulting in a purpose after gradual refinement and clarification. The second process is reactive involving a transformative life event where a purpose arises and adds clarity to the person’s life. The third process is social learning – involving the formation of purpose through observation, imitation, and modeling. Our aim is to stimulate more research on this higher-level construct in the architecture of personality.

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McKnight, P. E., & Kashdan, T. B. (2009). Purpose in life as a system that creates and sustains health and well-being: An integrative, testable theory. Review of General Psychology, 13, 242-251.

Purpose—a cognitive process that defines life goals and provides personal meaning—may help explain disparate empirical social science findings. Devoting effort and making progress toward life goals provides a significant, renewable source of engagement and meaning. Purpose offers a testable, causal system that synthesizes outcomes including life expectancy, satisfaction, and mental and physical health. These outcomes may be explained best by considering the motivation of the individual—a motivation that comes from having a purpose. We provide a detailed definition with specific hypotheses derived from a synthesis of relevant findings from social, behavioral, biological, and cognitive literatures. To illustrate the uniqueness of the purpose model, we compared purpose with competing contemporary models that offer similar predictions. Addressing the structural features unique to purpose opens opportunities to build upon existing causal models of “how and why” health and well-being develop and change over time.

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Kashdan, T. B., Mishra, A., Breen, W. E., & Froh, J. J. (2009). Gender differences in gratitude: Examining appraisals, narratives, the willingness to express emotions, and changes in psychological needs. Journal of Personality, 77, 691-730.

Previous work suggests women might possess an advantage over men in experiencing and benefiting from gratitude. We examined whether women perceive and react to gratitude differently than men. In Study 1, women, compared with men, evaluated gratitude expression to be less complex, uncertain, conflicting, and more interesting and exciting. In Study 2, college students and older adults described and evaluated a recent episode when they received a gift.Women, compared with men, reported less burden and obligation and greater gratitude. Upon gift receipt, older men reported the least positive affect when their benefactors were men. In Studies 2 and 3, women endorsed higher trait gratitude compared with men. In Study 3, over 3 months, women with greater gratitude were more likely to satisfy needs to belong and feel autonomous; gratitude had the opposite effect in men. The willingness to openly express emotions partially mediated gender differences, and effects could not be attributed to global trait affect. Results demonstrated that men were less likely to feel and express gratitude, made more critical evaluations of gratitude, and derived fewer benefits. Implications for the study and therapeutic enhancement of gratitude are discussed.

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Kashdan, T.B., Breen, W.E., & Julian, T. (2010). Everyday strivings in combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder: Problems arise when avoidance and emotion regulation dominate. Behavior Therapy, 41, 350-363.

This research investigated whether combat veterans’ daily strivings are related to the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and well-being. Veterans created a list of their most important strivings, which were content-analyzed for emotion regulation and approach or avoidance themes. It was hypothesized that veterans pursuing strivings with themes of emotion regulation or avoidance experience deleterious consequences compared with other veterans. For all veterans, devoting finite time and energy in daily life to regulating emotions was associated with less purpose, meaning, and joy compared with other strivings. Veterans with PTSD endorsed more strivings related to emotion regulation and devoted considerable effort to emotion regulation and avoidance strivings. Yet, these efforts failed to translate into any discernible benefits; veterans without PTSD derived greater joy and meaning from strivings focusing on approac- oriented behavior and themes other than emotion regulation. The presence of PTSD and a high rate of emotion regulation strivings led to the lowest global well-being and daily self-esteem during a 14-day assessment period. The presence of PTSD and a high rate of avoidance strivings also led to lower emotional well-being. Results indicate that strivings devoted to regulating emotions or avoidance efforts influence the mental health of veterans with and without PTSD. Studying personality at different levels of
analysis—traits, strivings, and life narratives—allows for a fine-grained understanding of emotional disorders.

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Kashdan, T.B., Pelham, W.E., Lang, A.R., Hoza, B., Jacob, R.G., Jennings, J.R., Blumenthal, J. D., & Gnagy, E.M. (2002). Hope and optimism as human strengths in parents of children with externalizing disorders: Stress is in the eye of the beholder. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 21, 441-468.

We examined hope as a potential resiliency factor for the daily strains of raising children with disruptive behavior disorders. In light of the motivational component of hope theory, initiating and sustaining effort toward goals (i.e., agency) , we were interested in hope’s relation to constructs addressing self-esteem, familial functioning,
and stress. Two hundred, fifty-two parents of children with externalizing disorders completed self-report questionnaires. Significant associations were found among hope and parental and familial functioning indices (e.g., warm and nurturing parenting styles, cohesive and active family environment, adaptive coping strategies). Considering their conceptual overlap, we tested the unique predictive power of hope and optimistic attributions on indices of psychological functioning. Separate regressions indicated that hope significantly predicted psychological
functioning beyond what was accounted for by social desirability, the severity of child symptoms, and optimistic attributions. Hope agency compared to hope pathways (i.e., perceived ability to generate strategies to obtain goals) accounted for the vast amount of variance in regression models. In contrast, optimistic attributions
failed to predict any of the variables of interest. Treatment and prevention strategies are suggested with an integrated focus on both the disruptive behaviors of children and parental character traits.

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Bandura, A. Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of Aggressions through Imitation of Aggressive Models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575-582.

A previous study, designed to account for the phenomenon of identification in terms of incidental learning, demonstrated that children readily imitated behavior exhibited by an adult model in the presence of the model (Bandura & Huston, 1961). A series of experiments by Blake (1958) and others (Grosser, Polansky, & Lippitt, 1951; Rosenblith, 1959; Schachter & Hall, 1952) have likewise shown that mere observation responses of a model has a facilitating effect on subjects’ reactions in the immediate social influence setting.

While these studies provide convincing evidence for the influence and control exerted on others by the behavior of a model, a more crucial test of imitative learning involves the generalization of imitative response patterns new settings in which the model is absent.

In the experiment reported in this paper children were exposed to aggressive and nonaggressive adult models and were then tested amount of imitative learning in a new situation on in the absence of the model. According the prediction, subjects exposed to aggressive models would reproduce aggressive acts resembling those of their models and would differ in this respect both from subjects who served nonaggressive models and from those ho had no prior exposure to any models. This hypothesis assumed that subjects had learned imitative habits as a result of prior reinforcement, and these tendencies would generalize to some extent to adult experimenters (Miller & Dollard, 1941).

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Anderson, C. A. & Bushman, B. J. (2002). Human Aggression. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 27-51.

Research on human aggression has progressed to a point at which a unifying framework is needed. Major domain-limited theories of aggression include cognitive neoassociation, social learning, social interaction, script, and excitation transfer theories. Using the general aggression model (GAM), this review posits cognition, affect, and arousal to mediate the effects of situational and personological variables on aggression. The review also organizes recent theories of the development and persistence of aggressive personality. Personality is conceptualized as a set of stable knowledge structures that individuals use to interpret events in their social world and to guide their behavior. In addition to organizing what is already known about human aggression, this review, using the GAM framework, also serves the heuristic function of suggesting what research is needed to fill in theoretical gaps and can be used to create and test interventions for reducing aggression.

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Anderson, C. A., Berkowitz, Donnerstein, E., Huesmann, L. R., Johnson, J. D., Linz, D., Malamuth, N. M., & Wartella, E. (2003). The Influence of Media Violence on Youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4, 81-110.

Research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts. The effects appear larger for milder than for more severe forms of aggression, but the effects on severe forms of violence are also substantial (r .13 to .32) when compared with effects of other violence risk factors or medical effects deemed important by the medical community (e.g., effect of aspirin on heart attacks).

The research base is large; diverse in methods, samples, and media genres; and consistent in overall findings. The evidence is clearest within the most extensively researched domain, television and film violence. The growing body of video-game research yields essentially the same conclusions. Short-term exposure increases the likelihood of physically and verbally aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts, and aggressive emotions. Recent large-scale longitudinal studies provide converging evidence linking frequent exposure to violent media in childhood with aggression later in life, including physical assaults and spouse abuse. Because extremely violent criminal behaviors (e.g., forcible rape, aggravated assault, homicide) are rare, new longitudinal studies with larger samples are needed to estimate accurately how much habitual childhood exposure to media violence increases the risk for extreme violence.

Well-supported theory delineates why and when exposure to media violence increases aggression and violence. Media violence produces short-term increases by priming existing aggressive scripts and cognitions, increasing physiological arousal, and triggering an automatic tendency to imitate observed behaviors. Media violence produces long-term effects via several types of learning processes leading to the acquisition of lasting (and automatically accessible) aggressive scripts, interpretational schemas, and aggression-supporting beliefs about social behavior, and by reducing individuals’ normal negative emotional responses to violence (i.e., desensitization).

Certain characteristics of viewers (e.g., identification with aggressive characters), social environments (e.g., parental influences), and media content (e.g., attractiveness of the perpetrator) can influence the degree to which media violence affects aggression, but there are some inconsistencies in research results. This research also suggests some avenues for preventive intervention (e.g., parental supervision, interpretation, and control of children’s media use). However, extant research on moderators suggests that no one is wholly immune to the effects of media violence.

Recent surveys reveal an extensive presence of violence in modern media. Furthermore, many children and youth spend an inordinate amount of time consuming violent media. Although it is clear that reducing exposure to media violence will reduce aggression and violence, it is less clear what sorts of interventions will produce a reduction in exposure. The sparse research literature suggests that counterattitudinal and parental-mediation interventions are likely to yield beneficial effects, but that media literacy interventions by them selves are unsuccessful.

Though the scientific debate over whether media violence increases aggression and violence is essentially over, several critical tasks remain. Additional laboratory and field studies are needed for a better understanding of underlying psychological processes, which eventually should lead to more effective interventions. Large-scale longitudinal studies would help specify the magnitude of media-violence effects on the most severe types of violence. Meeting the larger societal challenge of providing children and youth with a much healthier media diet
may prove to be more difficult and costly, especially if the scientific, news, public policy, and entertainment communities fail to educate the general public about the real risks of media-violence exposure to children and youth.

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Simon, H. A. (1990). A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism. Science, 250, 1665-1668.

Within the framework of neo-Darwinism, with its focus on fitness, it has been hard to account for altruism, behavior that reduces the fitness of the altruist but increases average fitness in society. Many population biologists argue that, except for altruism to close relatives, human behavior that appears to be altruistic amounts to reciprocal altruism, behavior undertaken with an expectation of reciprocation, hence incurring no net cost to fitness. Herein is proposed a simple and robust mechanism, based on human docility and bounded rationality, that can account for the evolutionary success of genuinely altruistic behavior. Because docility-receptivity to social influence-contributes greatly to fitness in the human species, it will be positively selected. As a consequence, society can impose a “tax” on the gross benefits gained by individuals from docility by inducing docile individuals to engage in altruistic behaviors. Limits on rationality in the face of environmental complexity prevent the individual from avoiding this “tax.” An upper bound is imposed on altruism by the condition that there must remain a net fitness advantage for docile behavior after the cost to the individual of altruism has been deducted.

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Becker, G. (1976). Altruism, Egoism, and Genetic Fitness: Economics and Sociobiology. Journal of Economic Literature, 14, 817-26.

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Piliavin, J. A. & Charng, H. (1990). Altruism: A Review of Recent Theory and Research. Annual Review of Sociology, 16, 27-65.

The literature on altruism in social psychology, and to a lesser degree in sociology, economics, political behavior and sociobiology since the early 1980’s is reviewed. The authors take the position that in all of these areas, there appears to be a “paradigm shift” away from the earlier position that behavior that appears to be altruistic must, under closer scrutiny, be revealed as reflecting egoistic motives. Rather, theory and data now being advanced are more compatible with the view that true altruism—acting with the goal of benefitting another—does exist and is a part of human nature.

Research in social psychology during the 80’s had a decreased emphasis on situational determinants of helping. Rather, it has focussed mainly on the following topics: the existence and nature of the altruistic personality, the debate concerning the nature of the motivation underlying helping behavior, and the nature of the process of the development of altruism in children and adults. During this time there has also been considerable theoretical and empirical work on possible biological bases for altruism, and on the evolutionary processes by which these might have developed. Within economics, politics, and sociology, the issues of behavior in social dilemmas, the provision of public goods, private and corporate philanthropy, and voluntarism (including donation of time, money, and physical parts of the self) are discussed.

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Penner, L. A., Dovidio, J. F., Piliavin, J. A., & Schroeder, D. A. (2005). Prosocial Behavior: Multilevel Perspectives. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 365-92.

Current research on prosocial behavior covers a broad and diverse range of phenomena. We argue that this large research literature can be best organized and understood from a multilevel perspective. We identify three levels of analysis of prosocial behavior: (a) the “meso” level—the study of helper-recipient dyads in the context of a specific situation; (b) the micro level—the study of the origins of prosocial tendencies and the sources of variation in these tendencies; and (c) the macro level—the study of prosocial actions that occur within the context of groups and large organizations. We present research at each level and discuss similarities and differences across levels. Finally, we consider ways in which theory and research at these three levels of analysis might be combined in future intra- and interdisciplinary research on prosocial behavior.

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Levine, R. V., Martinez, T. S., Brase, G., & Sorenson, K. (1994). Helping in 36 U.S. Cities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 69-82.

A series of experiments examined the relationship of urbanism to helping. Six types of helping behaviors were studied in a cross-sample of 36 small, medium, and large cities across the United States. The relationship of helping to a series of statistics reflecting the demographic, social, environmental, and economic characteristics of these communities was then examined. The strongest and most consistent predictor of overall helping was population density. There were significant correlations between economic indicators and helping in three situations. Helping in some situations also tended to be negatively related to violent crime rates and to environmental problems.

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Latane, B., & Darley, J. M. (1969). Bystander ‘Apathy.’ American Scientist, 57, 244-68.

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Darley, J. M. & Latane, B. (1968). Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8, 377-83.

COLLEGE SS OVERHEARD AN EPILEPTIC SIEZURE. THEY BELIEVED EITHER THAT THEY ALONE HEARD THE EMERGENCY, OR THAT 1 OR 4 UNSEEN OTHERS WERE ALSO PRESENT. AS PREDICTED, THE PRESENCE OF OTHER BYSTANDERS REDUCED THE INDIVIDUAL’S FEELINGS OF PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND LOWERED HIS SPEED OF REPORTING (P < .01). IN GROUPS OF 3, MALES REPORTED NO FASTER THAN FEMALES, AND FEMALES REPORTED NO SLOWER WHEN THE 1 OTHER BYSTANDER WAS A MALE RATHER THAN A FEMALE. IN GENERAL, PERSONALITY AND BACKGROUND MEASURES WERE NOT PREDICTIVE OF HELPING. BYSTANDER INACTION IN REAL LIFE EMERGENCIES IS OFTEN EXPLAINED BY APATHY, ALIENATION, AND ANOMIE. RESULTS SUGGEST THAT THE EXPLANATION MAY LIE IN THE BYSTANDER'S RESPONSE TO OTHER OS THAN IN HIS INDIFFERENCE TO THE VICTIM.

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Eagly, A., & Crowley, M. (1986). Gender and Helping Behavior: A Meta-analytic View of the Social Psychological Literature. Psychological Bulletin, 100, 283–308.

According to our social-role theory of gender and helping, the male gender role fosters helping that is heroic and chivalrous, whereas the female gender role fosters helping that is nurturant and caring. In social psychological studies, helping behavior has been examined in the context of short-term encounters with strangers. This focus has tended to exclude from the research literature those helping behaviors prescribed by the female gender role, because they are displayed primarily in long-term, close relationships. In contrast, the helping behaviors prescribed by the male gender role have been generously represented in research findings because they are displayed in relationships with strangers as well as in close relationships. Results from our meta-analytic review of sex differences in helping behavior indicate that in general men helped more than women and women received more help than men. Nevertheless, sex differences in helping were extremely inconsistent across studies and were successfully predicted by various attributes of the studies and the helping behaviors. These predictors were interpreted in terms of several aspects of our social-role theory of gender and helping.

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Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of Self-Worth. Psychological Review, 108, 593-623.

We argue that the importance of self-esteem lies in what people believe they need to be or do to have worth as a person. These contingencies of self-worth are both sources of motivation and areas of psychological vulnerability. In domains of contingent self-worth, people pursue self-esteem by attempting to validate their abilities and qualities. This pursuit of self-esteem, we argue, has costs to learning, relationships, autonomy, self-regulation, and mental and physical health. We suggest alternatives to this costly pursuit of self-esteem.

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Crocker, J., & Major, B. (1989). Social Stigma and Self-Esteem: The Self-Protective Properties of Stigma. Psychological Review, 96, 608-30.

Although several psychological theories predict that members of stigmatized groups should have low global self-esteem, empirical research typically does not support this prediction. It is proposed here that this discrepancy may be explained by considering the ways in which membership in a stigmatized group may protect the self-concept. It is proposed that members of stigmatized groups may (a) attribute negative feedback to prejudice against their group, (b) compare their outcomes with those of the ingroup, rather than with the relatively advantaged outgroup, and (c) selectively devalue those dimensions on which their group fares poorly and value those dimensions on which their group excels. Evidence for each of these processes and their consequences for self-esteem and motivation is reviewed. Factors that moderate the use of these strategies and implications of this analysis for treatment of stigmas are also discussed.

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Howard, J. A. (2000). Social Psychology of Identities. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 367-93.

In this chapter I review the social psychological underpinnings of identity, emphasizing social cognitive and symbolic interactionist perspectives and research, and I turn then to key themes of current work on identity-social psychological, sociological, and interdisciplinary. I emphasize the social bases of identity, particularly identities based on ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender, class, age, and (dis)ability, both separately and as they intersect. I also take up identities based on space, both geographic and virtual. I discuss struggles over identities, organized by social inequalities, nationalisms, and social movements. I conclude by discussing postmodernist conceptions of identities as fluid, multidimensional, personalized social constructions that reflect sociohistorical contexts, approaches remarkably consistent with recent empirical social psychological research, and I argue explicitly for a politicized social psychology of identities that brings together the structures of everyday lives and the sociocultural realities in which those lives are lived

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Hogg, M. A., Terry, D. J., & White, K. M. (1995). A Tale of Two Theories: A Critical Comparison of Identity Theory with Social Identity Theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, 58, 255-269.

Identity theory and social identity theory are two remarkably similar perspectives on the dynamic mediation of the socially constructed self between individual behavior and social structure. Yet there is almost no systematic communication between these two perspectivies; they occupy parallel bur separate universes. This article describes both theories, summarizes their similarities, critically discusses their differences and outlines some research directions. Against a background of metatheoretical similarity, we find marked differences in terms of 1) level of analysis, 2) the role of intergroup behavior, 3) the relationship between roles and groups, and 4) salience of social context and identity. Differences can be traced largely to the microsociological roots of identity theory and the psychological roots of social identity theory. Identiy theory may be more effective in dealing with chronic identities and with interpersonal social interaction, while social identity theory may be more useful in exploring intergroup dimensions and in specifying the sociocognitive generative details of identity dynamics.

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Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect. Psychological Review, 94, 319-340.

This article presents a theory of how different types of discrepancies between self-state representations are related to different kinds of emotional vulnerabilities. One domain of the self (actual; ideal; ought) and one standpoint on the self (own; significant other) constitute each type of self-state representation. It is proposed that different types of self-discrepancies represent different types of negative psychological situations that are associated with different kinds of discomfort. Discrepancies between the actual/own self-state (i.e., the self-concept) and ideal self-stales (i.e., representations of an individual’s beliefs about his or her own or a significant other’s hopes, wishes, or aspirations for the individual) signify the absence of positive outcomes, which is associated with dejection-related
emotions (e.g., disappointment, dissatisfaction, sadness). In contrast, discrepancies between the actual/own self-state and ought self-states (i.e., representations of an individual’s beliefs about his or her own or a significant other’s beliefs about the individual’s duties, responsibilities, or obligations) signify the presence of negative outcomes, which is associated with agitation-related emotions (e.g., fear, threat, restlessness). Differences in both the relative magnitude and the accessibility of individuals’ available types of self-discrepancies are predicted to be related to differences in the kinds of discomfort people are likely to experience. Correlational and experimental evidence supports the predictions of the model. Differences between serf-discrepancy theory and (a) other theories of incompatible self-beliefs and (b) actual self negativity (e.g., low self-esteem) are discussed.

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Festinger, L. (1954). A Theory of Social Comparison Processes. Human Relations, 7, 117-140.

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Baumeister, R. (1987). How the Self became a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 163-76.

In this article, historical evidence pertaining to self hood is reviewed. A scheme of stages is delineated, according to which the modern self and its uncertainties have evolved. The historical data are then reviewed in connection with the following four major problems regarding the self: knowing and conceptualizing the self; defining or creating the self; understanding one’s potential and fulfilling it; and relating the single self to society.

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Zajonc, R. B. (1968). The Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 1-27.

The hypothesis is offered that mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus object enhances his attitude toward it. By “mere” exposure is meant a condition making the stimulus accessible to the individual’s perception.
Support for the hypothesis consists of 4 types of evidence, presented and reviewed: (a) the correlation between affective connotation of words and word frequency; (b) the effect of experimentally manipulated frequency of
exposure upon the affective connotation of nonsense words and symbols; (c) the correlation between word frequency and the attitude to their referents; (d) the effects of experimentally manipulated frequency of exposure on attitude. The relevance for the exposure-attitude hypothesis of the exploration theory and of the semantic satiation findings were examined.

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Buss, D. M. & Barnes, M. L. (1986). Preferences in Human Mate Selection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 559-570.

In this article we examine preferences in mate choice within the broader context of the human mating system. Specifically, we discuss the consequences of mate preferences for the processes of assortative mating and sexual selection. In Study 1 (N = 184) we document (a) the mate characteristics that are consensually more and less desired, (b) the mate characteristics that show strong sex differences in their preferred value, (c) the degree to which married couples are correlated in selection preferences, and (d) the relations between expressed preferences and the personality and background characteristics of obtained spouses. In Study 2 (N = 100) we replicated the sex differences and consensual ordering of mate preferences found in Study I, using a different methodology and a differently composed sample. Lastly, we present alternative hypotheses to account for the replicated sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and earning potential.

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Berscheid, E. (1994). Interpersonal Relationships. Annual Review of Psychology, 45, 79-129.

Since Clark & Reis’ (1988) review of the relationship domain, the field has experienced phenomenal growth. Relationship scholars now must monitor an increasing number of journals in which relationship theory and research is published as well as the growing number of books and conferences devoted to relationship work. They also must be sensitive to the methodological and analytical techniques the study of interpersonal relationships requires because of the temporal nature of relationships, the dependency of dyadic observations, and the dichotomous nature of important outcome variables…

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Postmes, T., Spears, R., & Cihangir, S. (2001). Quality of Decision Making and Group Norms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 918-30.

Two studies investigated the impact of group norms for maintaining consensus versus norms for critical thought on group decisions in a modification of the biased sampling paradigm (G. Stasser & W. Titus, 1985). Both studies showed that critical norms improved the quality of decisions, whereas consensus norms did not. This effect appeared to be mediated by the perceived value of shared and unshared information: Consensus norm groups valued shared information more highly than critical groups did, and valence was a good predictor of decision outcome. In addition, the 2nd study showed that the group norm manipulation has no impact on individual decisions, consistent with the assumption that this is a group effect. Results suggest that the content of group norms is an important factor influencing the quality of group decision-making processes and that the content of group norms may be related to the group’s proneness for groupthink.

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Pettigrew, T. (1998). Intergroup Contact Theory. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 65-85.

Allport specified four conditions for optimal intergroup contact: equal group status within the situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation and authority support. Varied research supports the hypothesis, but four problems remain. 1. A selection bias limits cross-sectional studies, since prejudiced people avoid intergroup contact. Yet research finds that the positive effects of cross-group friendship are larger than those of the bias. 2. Writers overburden the hypothesis with facilitating, but not essential, conditions. 3. The hypothesis fails to address process. The chapter proposes four processes: learning about the outgroup, changed behavior, affective ties, and ingroup reappraisal. 4. The hypothesis does not specify how the effects generalize to other situations, the outgroup or uninvolved outgroups. Acting sequentially, three strategies enhance generalization-decategorization, salient categorization, and recategorization. Finally, both individual differences and societal norms shape intergroup contact effects. The chapter outlines a longitudinal intergroup contact theory. It distinguishes between essential and facilitating factors, and emphasizes different outcomes for different stages of contact.

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Kerr, N. L. & Tindale, R. S. (2004). Group Performance and Decision Making. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 623-55.

Theory and research on small group performance and decision making is reviewed. Recent trends in group performance research have found that process gains as well as losses are possible, and both are frequently explained by situational and procedural contexts that differentially affect motivation and resource coordination. Research has continued on classic topics (e.g., brainstorming, group goal setting, stress, and group performance) and relatively new areas (e.g., collective induction). Group decision making research has focused on preference combination for continuous response distributions and group information processing. New approaches (e.g., group-level signal detection) and traditional topics (e.g., groupthink) are discussed. New directions, such as nonlinear dynamic systems, evolutionary adaptation, and technological advances, should keep small group research vigorous well into the future.

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Janis, I. L. (1971). Groupthink among Policy Makers. In Sanford, N., & Comstock, C. (Eds.) Sanctions for Evil (pp. 71-89). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

I have been studying a series of notorious decisions made by government leaders, including major fiascos such as the Vietnam escalation decisions of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, the Bay of Pigs invasion plan of the John F. Kennedy administration, and the Korean Crisis decision of the Harry Truman administration, which unintentionally provoked Red China to enter the war. In addition, I have examined some fiascos by European governments, such as the policy of appeasement carried out by Neville Chamberlain and his inner cabinet during the late 1930s—a policy which turned over to the Nazis the populations and military resources of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other small countries of Europe. In all these instances, the decision-making groups took little account of some of the major consequences of their actions, including the moral and humanitarian
implications.

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Hewstone, M., Rubin, M., & Willlis, H. (2002). Intergroup Bias. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 575-604.

This chapter reviews the extensive literature on bias in favor of in-groups at the expense of out-groups. We focus on five issues and identify areas for future research: (a) measurement and conceptual issues (especially in-group favoritism vs. out-group derogation, and explicit vs. implicit measures of bias); (b) modern theories of bias highlighting motivational explanations (social identity, optimal distinctiveness, uncertainty reduction, social dominance, terror management); (c) key moderators of bias, especially those that exacerbate bias (identification, group size, status and power, threat, positive-negative asymmetry, personality and individual differences); (d) reduction of bias (individual vs. intergroup approaches, especially models of social categorization); and (e) the link between intergroup bias and more corrosive forms of social hostility.

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Bond, R., & Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and Conformity: A Meta-analysis of Studies Using Asch’s (1952, 1956) Line Judgment Task. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 111-37.

A meta-analysis of conformity studies using an Asch-type line judgment task (1952b, 1956) was conducted to investigate whether the level of conformity has changed over time and whether it is related cross-culturally to individualism-collectivism. The literature search produced 133 studies drawn from 17 countries. An analysis of U.S. studies found that conformity has declined since the 1950s. Results from 3 surveys were used to assess a country’s individualism-collectivism, and for each survey the measures were found to be significantly related to conformity. Collectivist countries tended to show higher levels of conformity than individualist countries. Conformity research must attend more to cultural variables and to their role in the processes involved in social influence.

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Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and Social Pressure. Scientific American, 193, 31-35.

That social influences shape every person’s practices, judgments and beliefs is a truism to which anyone will readily assent. A child masters his “native” dialect down to the finest nuances; a member of a tribe of cannibals accepts cannibalism as altogether fitting and proper. All the social sciences take their departure from the observation of the
profound effects that groups exert on their members. For psychologists, group pressure upon the minds of individuals raises a host of questions they would like to investigate in detail.

How, and to what extent, do social forces constrain people’s opinions and attitudes? This question is especially pertinent in our day. The same epoch that has witnessed the unprecedented technical extension of communication has also brought into existence the deliberate manipulation of opinion and the “engineering of consent.” There are many good reasons why, as citizens and as scientists, we should be concerned with studying the ways in which human beings form their opinions and the role that social conditions play.

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Slater, M. D. (1999). Integrating Application of Media Effects, Persuasion, and Behavior Change Theories to Communication Campaigns: A Stage-of-Change Framework. Health Communication, 11, 335-354.

A central problem in the planning of communication campaigns to change health behaviors is how to identify and apply appropriate communication, persuasion, and behavior change theories to overcome obstacles to behavior change. The stages-of-change model (Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992) provides a framework for integrating theories of media effects, such as agenda setting and multistep flow; theories of persuasion, such as the elaboration likelihood model and protection motivation theory; and theories of behavior change, such as the theory of reasoned action, social cognitive theory, and attitude accessibility, for communication campaign purposes. Implications for audience segmentation, selection of objectives, campaign strategy, and message design are discussed.

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Wood, W. (2000). Attitude Change: Persuasion and Social Influence. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 539-70.

This chapter reviews empirical and theoretical developments in research on social influence and message-based persuasion. The review emphasizes research published during the period from 1996-1998. Across these literatures, three central motives have been identified that generate attitude change and resistance. These involve concerns with the self, with others and the rewards/punishments they can provide, and with a valid understanding of reality. The motives have implications for information processing and for attitude change in public and private contexts. Motives in persuasion also have been investigated in research on attitude functions and cognitive dissonance theory. In addition, the chapter reviews the relatively unique aspects of each literature: In persuasion, it considers the cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying attitude change, especially dual-mode processing models, recipients’ affective reactions, and biased processing. In social influence, the chapter considers how attitudes are embedded in social relations, including social identity theory and majority/minority group influence.

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Petty, R. E. & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19 124-205.

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Barber, J. S. (2001). Ideational Influences on the Transition to Parenthood: Attitudes towards Childbearing and Competing Alternatives. Social Psychology Quarterly, 64, 101-27.

In this paper I propose an expansion of the theory of planned behavior that considers how attitudes toward competing behaviors affect a focal behavior. Specifically, I explore how attitudes toward childbearing and the competing behaviors of educational attainment, career development, and consumer spending affect childbearing behavior. The empirical analyses use data from an eight-wave longitudinal study of mother-child pairs, the Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children. The results indicate that positive attitudes toward children and childbearing increase rates of marital childbearing, while positive attitudes toward careers and luxury goods reduce rates of premarital childbearing. I conclude that theories and models of the attitude-behavior relationship should be expanded to include attitudes toward competing behaviors, and that social scientists who study childbearing behavior would benefit from greater emphasis on social psychological explanations of behavior.

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LaPiere, R.T. (1934). Attitudes vs. Actions. Social Forces, 13, 230-237.

By definition, a social attitude is a behavior pattern, anticipatory set or tendency, predisposition to specific adjustment to designated social situations, or, more simply, a conditioned response to social stimuli1. Terminological usage differs, but students who have concerned themselves with attitudes apparently agree that they are acquired out of social experience and provide the individual organism with some degree of preparation to adjust, in a well-defined way, to certain types of social situations if and when these situations arise. It would seem, therefore, that the totality of the social attitudes of a single individual would include all his socially acquired personality which is involved in the making of adjustments to other human beings.

But by derivation social attitudes are seldom more than a verbal response to a symbolic situation. For the conventional method of measuring social attitudes is to ask questions (usually in writing) which demand a verbal adjustment . . .

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Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-210.

What happens to a person’s private opinion if he is forced to do or say something contrary to that opinion? Only recently has there been any experimental work related to this question. Two studies reported by Janis and King (1954; 1956) clearly showed that, at least under some conditions, the private opinion changes so as to bring it into closer correspondence with the overt behavior the person was forced to perform. Specifically, they showed that if a person is forced to improvise a speech supporting a point of view with which he disagrees, his private opinion moves toward the position advocated in the speech. The observed opinion change is greater than for persons who only hear the speech or for persons who read a prepared speech with emphasis solely on execution and manner of delivery The authors of these two studies explain their results mainly in terms of mental rehearsal and thinking up new arguments. In this way, they propose, the person who is forced to improvise a speech convinces himself. They present some evidence, which is not altogether conclusive, in support of this explanation. We will have more to say concerning this explanation in discussing the results of our experiment.

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Ajzen, I. (2001). Nature and Operation of Attitudes. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 27-58.

This survey of attitude theory and research published between 1996 and 1999 covers the conceptualization of attitude, attitude formation and activation, attitude structure and function, and the attitude-behavior relation. Research regarding the expectancy-value model of attitude is considered, as are the roles of accessible beliefs and affective versus cognitive processes in the formation of attitudes. The survey reviews research on attitude strength and its antecedents and consequences, and covers progress made on the assessment of attitudinal ambivalence and its effects. Also considered is research on automatic attitude activation, attitude functions, and the relation of attitudes to broader values. A large number of studies dealt with the relation between attitudes and behavior. Research revealing additional moderators of this relation is reviewed, as are theory and research on the link between intentions and actions. Most work in this context was devoted to issues raised by the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior. The present review highlights the nature of perceived behavioral control, the relative importance of attitudes and subjective norms, the utility of adding more predictors, and the roles of prior behavior and habit.

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Ajzen, I. (1991). The Theory of Planned Behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50, 179-211.

Research dealing with various aspects of the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1985 and Ajzen, 1987) is reviewed, and some unresolved issues are discussed. In broad terms, the theory is found to be well supported by empirical evidence. Intentions to perform behaviors of different kinds can be predicted with high accuracy from attitudes toward the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control; and these intentions, together with perceptions of behavioral control, account for considerable variance in actual behavior. Attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control are shown to be related to appropriate sets of salient behavioral, normative, and control beliefs about the behavior, but the exact nature of these relations is still uncertain. Expectancy-value formulations are found to be only partly successful in dealing with these relations. Optimal rescaling of expectancy and value measures is offered as a means of dealing with measurement limitations. Finally, inclusion of past behavior in the prediction equation is shown to provide a means of testing the theory’s sufficiency, another issue that remains unresolved. The limited available evidence concerning this question shows that the theory is predicting behavior quite well in comparison to the ceiling imposed by behavioral reliability.

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Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972). What is Beautiful is Good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24, 285-90.

Examined whether physically attractive stimulus persons, both male and female, are (a) assumed to possess more socially desirable personality traits than physically unattractive stimulus persons, and (b) expected to lead better lives (e.g. be more competent husbands and wives and more successful occupationally) than unattractive stimulus persons. Sex of Subject * Sex of Stimulus Person interactions along these dimensions also were investigated. Results with 30 male and 30 female undergraduates indicate a “what is beautiful is good” stereotype along the physical attractiveness dimension with no Sex of Judge * Sex of Stimulus interaction. Implications of such a stereotype on self-concept development and the course of social interaction are discussed.

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Gilbert, D, T. & Malone, P. S. (1995). The Correspondence Bias. Psychological Bulletin 117, 21-38.

The correspondence bias is the tendency to draw inferences about a person’s unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur. Although this tendency is one of the most fundamental phenomena in social psycholoxgy, its causes and consequences remain poorly understood. This article sketches an intellectual history of the correspondence bias as an evolving problem in social psychology, describes 4 mechanisms (lack of awareness, unrealistic expectations, inflated categorizations, and incomplete corrections) that produce distinct forms of correspondence bias, and discusses how the consequences of correspondence-biased inferences may perpetuate such inferences.

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Freeman, L, C. (1992). Filling in the Blanks: A Theory of Cognitive Categories and the Structure of Social Affiliation. Social Psychology Quarterly 55, 118-127.

This paper shows that people are aware of who is affiliated with whom in their immediate social world. Their perceptions of the patterning of affiliation, however, do not correspond to the patterning actually displayed by interacting humans. Affiliation is not categorical; perceptions of affiliation are, however. On the basis of experimental evidence about errors in learning simple social structures, a theory that accounts for this discrepancy is proposed. This theory suggests that people impose a categorical form on noncategorical affiliation patterns by a process of filling in the blanks in their experience.

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Tversky, A, & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgments under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science 185, 1124-1131.

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Morgan, D. L. & Schwalbe, M. L. (1990). Mind and Self in Society: Linking Social Structure and Social Cognition. Social Psychology Quarterly 53, 148-64.

Recent developments in social cognition could enhance sociological social psychologists’ understanding of the mind as both a social product and a social force; yet this work in social cognition has received little attention. Conversely, social cognition has not fulfilled its promise to show what is truly social about cognition. We argue that more attention to social cognition on the part of sociologists would be beneficial to both fields, as would more attention to social structure on the part of those working in social cognition

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Tourangeau, R. (2004). Survey Research and Societal Change. Annual Review of Psychology 55, 775-801.

Surveys reflect societal change in a way that few other research tools do. Over the past two decades, three developments have transformed surveys. First, survey organizations have adopted new methods for selecting telephone samples; these new methods were made possible by the creation of large databases that include all listed telephone numbers in the United States. A second development has been the widespread decline in response rates for all types of surveys. In the face of this problem, survey researchers have developed new theories of nonresponse that build on the persuasion literature in social psychology. Finally, surveys have adopted many new methods of data collection; the new modes reflect technological developments in computing and the emergence of the Internet. Research has spawned several theories that examine how characteristics of the data collection method shape the answers obtained. Rapid change in survey methods is likely to continue in the coming years.

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Baron, R. M. & Kenny, D. A. (1986). The Moderator-Mediator Variable Distinction in Social Psychological Research: Conceptual, Strategic, and Statistical Considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, 1173-1182.

In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators.

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Tebes, J, K. (2000). External Validity and Scientific Psychology. American Psychologist. 55(12), 1508-1509.

Stanley Sue (December 1999) has eloquently described a persistent problem in psychological research: the relative lack of research on ethnic minorities. Sue traced the source of this problem to how science is practiced and, in particular, to scientific psychology’s emphasis on internal validity over external validity. He argued that researchers’ assumption that causal inferences drawn from a given study are generalizable across individuals from different ethnic backgrounds ultimately masks true differences among diverse ethnic groups and hinders research to determine whether such differences exist. Sue recommended that researchers increase their emphasis on external validity in study designs and embrace methodological pluralism in adopting more qualitative and ethnographic approaches to complement traditional scientistic methods used in psychological research.

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Sears, D. O. (1986). College Sophomores in the Laboratory: Influences of a Narrow Data Base on Psychology’s View of Human Nature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 51. 515-30.

For the 2 decades prior to 1960, published research in social psychology was based on a wide variety of subjects and research sites. Content analyses show that since then such research has overwhelmingly been based on college students tested in academic laboratories on academiclike tasks. How might this heavy dependence on one narrow data base have biased the main substantive conclusions of sociopsychological research in this era? Research on the full life span suggests that, compared with older adults, college students are likely to have less-crystallized attitudes, less-formulated senses of self, stronger cognitive skills, stronger tendencies to comply with authority, and more unstable peer group relationships. The laboratory setting is likely to exaggerate all these differences. These peculiarities of social psychology’s predominant data base may have contributed to central elements of its portrait of human nature. According to this view people (a) are quite compliant and their behavior is easily socially influenced, (b) readily change their attitudes and (c) behave inconsistently with them, and (d) do not rest their self-perceptions on introspection. The narrow data base may also contribute to this portrait of human nature’s (e) strong emphasis on cognitive processes and to its lack of emphasis on (f) personality dispositions, (g) material self-interest, (h) emotionally based irrationalities, (i) group norms, and (j) stage-specific phenomena. The analysis implies the need both for more careful examination of sociopsychological propositions for systematic biases introduced by dependence on this narrow data base and for increased reliance on adults tested in their natural habitats with materials drawn from ordinary life.

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Stolte, J. F., Fine, G. A., & Cook, K. S. (2001). Sociological Miniaturism: Seeing the Big through the Small in Social Psychology. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 387-413.

The distinctive contribution of sociological social psychology can be referred to as sociological miniaturism, a way of interpreting social processes and institutions that is microsociological more than it is psychological. We argue that social psychology of this variety permits the examination of large-scale social issues by means of investigation of small-scale social situations. The power of this approach to social life is that it permits recognition of the dense texture of everyday life, permits sociologists to understand more fully a substantive domain, and permits interpretive control. In the chapter we provide examples of this approach from two quite distinct theoretical orientations: symbolic interactionism and social exchange theory. We discuss the ways in which the study of two substantive topics, social power and collective identity, using these perspectives can be informed by closer collaboration between theorists within sociological social psychology. In the end it is our hope that pursuing such integrative theoretical and methodological efforts will produce a more complete understanding of important social phenomena. We offer sociological miniaturism as a promising vehicle for advancing the earlier call for greater mutual appreciation of and rapprochement between diverse lines of social psychological work in sociology.

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Simon, H. A. (1990). Invariants of Human Behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 1-19.

The fundamental goal of science is to find invariants, such as conservation ofmass and energy and the speed of light in physics. In much of science theinvariants are neither as general nor as “invariant” as these classical laws. Forinstance, the isotopes of the elements have atomic weights that are nearly integral multiples of the weight of hydrogen. Some inheritable traits of plantsand animals observe the classical 1-2-1 ratio of Mendel. The number offamiliar information chunks that can be held in short-term memory is approx-imately seven. It takes about 30 seconds to memorize an unpronouncable three-consonant nonsense syllable, but only about nine seconds to memorize a three-letter word.

Much biological knowledge is extremely specific, for biology rests on thediversity of millions of species of plants and animals, and most of itsinvariants apply only to single species. Because of inter-species molecular differences, even the important general laws (e.g. the laws of photosynthesis)vary in detail from one species to another (and sometimes among differentindividuals in a single species). Only at the most abstract and qualitative levelcan one find many general strict invariants in biology.Moreover, some of the most important invariants in science are not quan-titative at all, but are what Allen Newell and I (1976) have called “lawsqualitative structure.” For example, the germ theory of disease, surely one ofPasteur’s major contributions to biology, says only something like: “If you observe pathology, look for a microorganism it might be causing the symp-toms.” Similarly, modem molecular genetics stems from the approximately correct generalization that inheritance of traits is governed by the arrangementof long helical sequences of the four DNA nucleotides.

Finally, in biological (including human) realms, systems change adaptivelyover time. Simple change is not the problem, for Newton showed how we canwrite invariant laws as differential equations that describe the eternal move-ments of the heavens. But with adaptative change, which is as much governedby a system’s environment as by its internal constitution, it becomes moredifficult to identify true invariants. As a result, evolutionary biology has arather different flavor from physics, chemistry, or even molecular biology.In establishing aspirations for psychology it is useful to keep all of these models of science in mind.

Psychology does not much resemble classical mechanics, nor should it aim to do so. Its laws are, and will be, limited inrange and generality and will be mainly qualitative. Its invariants are and willbe of the kinds that are appropriate to adaptive systems. Its success must bemeasured not by how closely it resembles physics but by how well it describesand explains human behavior.On another occasion (Simon 1979a) I have considered the form a sciencemust take in order to explain the behavior of an adaptive, hence of anartificial, system. By “artificial” I mean a system that is what it is onlybecause it has responded to the shaping forces of an environment to which itmust adapt in order to survive. Adaptation may be quite unconscious andunintended, as in Darwinian evolution, or it may contain large components ofconscious intention, as in much human learning and problem solving.

Taking the artificiality of human behavior as my central theme, I shouldlike to consider its implications for psychology. Moreover, since Homosapiens shares some important psychological invariants with certain nonbio-logical systems–the computers I shall want to make frequent reference tothem also. One could even say that my account will cover the topic of humanand computer psychology.

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Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (1992). The man who mistook his wife for a chattel. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The Adapted Mind (pp. 289-322). New York: Oxford University Press.

Men take a proprietary view of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity. In this chapter, we (a) argue that sexually proprietary male psychologies are evolved solutions to the adaptive problems of male reproductive competition and potential misdirection of paternal investments in species with mistakable paternity; (b) describe the complex interrelated design of mating and paternal decision rules in some well-studied avian examples; (c) consider the peculiarities of the human species in this context; (d) characterize some features of human male sexual proprietariness, contrasting men’s versus women’s perspectives and actions; and (e) review some of the diverse consequences and manifestations of this ubiquitous male mindset.

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Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990). On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of Personality, 58, 17-68.

The concept of a universal human nature, based on a species-typical collection of complex psychological adaptations, is defended as valid, despite the existence of substantial genetic variation that makes each human genetically and biochemically unique. These apparently contradictory facts can be reconciled by considering that (a) complex adaptations necessarily require many genes to regulate their development, and (b) sexual recombination makes it improbable that all the necessary genes for a complex adaptation would be together at once in the same individual, if genes coding for complex adaptations varied substantially between individuals. Selection, interacting with sexual recombination, tends to impose relative uniformity at the functional level in complex adaptive designs, suggesting that most heritable psychological differences are not themselves likely to be complex psychological adaptations. Instead, they are mostly evolutionary by-products, such as concomitants of parasite-driven selection for biochemical individuality. An evolutionary approach to psychological variation reconceptualizes traits as either the output of species-typical, adaptively designed development and psychological mechanisms, or as the result of genetic noise creating perturbations in these mechanisms.

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Tooby, J. (1982). Pathogens, polymorphism, and the evolution of sex. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 97, 557-576.

For short-lived pathogens, adaptation to one host genotype is negatively correlated with adaptation to others when host genotypes are sufficiently differentiated. This may provide an adaptive basis for sexual recombination, which lowers cross-genotypic correlations among offspring and other kin, and thereby interferes with pathogenic transmission, multiplication, and adaptation. Such pathogen-host interactions lead to generalized frequency-dependent selection for allozymic diversity. The ecological and life-historical correlates of parthenogenesis, inbreeding, chromosome number, and polymorphism are consistent with this hypothesis.

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Singh, D. (1993). Adaptive significance of female physical attractiveness: Role of waist-to-hip ratio. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 293-307.

Evidence is presented showing that body fat distribution as measured by waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is correlated with youthfulness, reproductive endocrinologic status, and long-term health risk in women. Three studies show that men judge women with low WHR as attractive. Study 1 documents that minor changes in WHRs of Miss America winners and Playboy playmates have occurred over the past 30-60 years. Study 2 shows that college-age men find female figures with low WHR more attractive, healthier, and of greater reproductive value than figures with a higher WHR.

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Shackelford, T. K., Buss, D. M., & Peters, J. (2000). Wife killing: Risk to women as a function of age. Violence and Victims, 15, 273-282.

Younger women, relative to older women, incur elevated risk of uxoricide-being murdered by their husbands. Some evolutionary theorists attribute this pattern to men’s evolved sexual proprietariness, which inclines them to use violence to control women, especially those high in reproductive value. Other evolutionary theorists propose an evolved homicide module for wife killing. An alternative to both explanations is that young women experience elevated uxoricide risk as an incidental byproduct of marriage to younger men who commit the majority of acts of violence. We used a sample of 13,670 uxoricides to test these alternative explanations. Findings show that (a) reproductive-age women incur an elevated risk of uxoricide relative to older women; (b) younger men are overrepresented among uxoricide perpetrators; and (c) younger women, even when married to older men, still incur excess risk of uxoricide. Discussion examines competing explanations for uxoricide in light of these findings.

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Shackelford, T. K., & Goetz, A. T. (2004). Men’s sexual coercion in intimate relationships: Development and initial validation of the Sexual Coercion in Intimate Relationships Scale. Violence and Victims, 19, 541-556.

We report the development and initial validation of the Sexual Coercion in Intimate Relationships Scale (SCIRS), a measure designed to assess the prevalence and severity of sexual coercion in committed intimate relationships. We review existing measures of sexual coercion and discuss their limitations, describe the identification of the SCIRS items, perform a principal components analysis and describe the resulting three components, and present evidence for the convergent and discriminative validity of the SCIRS. Because sexual coercion in intimate relationships often takes the form of subtle tactics, the SCIRS items assess communicative tactics such as hinting and subtle manipulations in addition to tactics such as the use of physical force. The SCIRS provides researchers and clinicians with a valid, reliable, and comprehensive measure with which to study the dynamics of sexual coercion in intimate relationships.

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Shackelford, T. K., & Goetz, A. T. (2006). Comparative evolutionary psychology of sperm competition. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120, 139-146.

A comparative evolutionary psychological perspective predicts that species that recurrently faced similar adaptive problems may have evolved similar psychological mechanisms to solve these problems. Sperm competition provides an arena in which to assess the heuristic value of such a comparative evolutionary perspective. The sperm competition that results from female infidelity and polyandry presents a similar class of adaptive problems for individuals across many species. The authors first describe mechanisms of sperm competition in insects and in birds. They suggest that the adaptive problems and evolved solutions in these species provide insight into human anatomy, physiology, psychology, and behavior. The authors then review recent theoretical and empirical arguments for the existence of sperm competition in humans and discuss proposed adaptations in humans that have analogs in insects or birds. The authors conclude by highlighting the heuristic value of a comparative evolutionary psychological approach in this field.

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Shackelford, T. K., & Goetz, A. T. (2007). Adaptation to sperm competition in humans. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 47-50.

With the recognition, afforded by recent evolutionary science, that female infidelity was a recurrent feature of modern humans’ evolutionary history has come the development of a unique area in the study of human mating: sperm competition. A form of male-male postcopulatory competition, sperm competition occurs when the sperm of two or more males concurrently occupy the reproductive tract of a female and compete to fertilize her ova. Males must compete for mates, but if two or more males have copulated with a female within a sufficiently short period of time, sperm will compete for fertilizations. Psychological, behavioral, physiological, and anatomical evidence indicates that men have evolved solutions to combat the adaptive problem of sperm competition, but research has only just begun to uncover these adaptations.

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Scarr, S., & McCartney, K. (1983). How people make their own environments: A theory of genotype –> environment effects. Child Development, 54, 424-435.

We propose a theory of development in which experience is directed by genotypes. Genotypic differences are proposed to affect phenotypic differences, both directly and through experience, via 3 kinds of genotype leads to environment effects: a passive kind, through environments provided by biologically related parents; an evocative kind, through responses elicited by individuals from others; and an active kind, through the selection of different environments by different people. The theory adapts the 3 kinds of genotype-environment correlations proposed by Plomin, DeFries, and Loehlin in a developmental model that is used to explain results from studies of deprivation, intervention, twins, and families.

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Sadalla, E. K., & Kenrick, D. T. (1987). Dominance and heterosexual attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 730-738.

Four experiments examined the relation between behavioral expressions of dominance and the heterosexual attractiveness of males and females. Predictions concerning the relation between dominance and heterosexual attraction were derived from a consideration of sex role norms and from the comparative biological literature. All four experiments indicated an interaction between dominance and sex of target. Dominance behavior increased the attractiveness of males, but had no effect on the attractiveness of females. The third study indicated that the effect did not depend on the sex of the rater or on the sex of those with whom the dominant target interacted. The fourth study showed that the effect was specific to dominance as an independent variable and did not occur for related constructs (aggressive or domineering). This study also found that manipulated dominance enhanced only a male’s sexual attractiveness and not his general likability. The results were discussed in terms of potential biological and cultural causal mechanisms.

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Rushton, J.P. (1988). Race differences in behaviour: A review and evolutionary analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 9(6), 1009-1024.

Racial differences exist on numerous heritable behaviour traits such that Caucasoids fall between Mongoloids and Negroids. Across samples, ages, and time periods, this pattern is observed on estimates made of brain size and intelligence (cranial CAPACITY=1448, 1408, 1334 cm3., brain WEIGHT=1351, 1336, 1286 g; IQ SCORES=107, 100, 85); maturation rate (age to walk alone, age of puberty, age of death); personality and temperament (activity level, anxiety, sociability); sexual restraint (gamete production, intercourse frequency, size of genitalia); and social organization (marital stability, mental health, law abidingness). These observations may be explained in part in terms of gene-culture coevolutionarily based r/K reproductive strategies.

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Posner, M.I. (1994). Attention: The mechanisms of consciousness. Procedures of the National Academy of Science, 91, 7398-7403.

A number of recent papers and books discuss theoretical efforts toward a scientific understanding of consciousness. Progress in imaging networks of brain areas active when people perform simple tasks may provide a useful empirical background for distinguishing conscious and unconscious informations processing. Attention networks include those involved in orienting to sensory stimuli, activating ideas from memory, and maintaining the alert state. This paper reviews recent finding in relation to classical issues in the study of attention and anatomical and physical theories of the nature of consciousness.

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Platt, J. (1964). Strong inference. Science, 146, 347-353.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided
opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist’s field and
methods of study are as good as every other scientist’s, and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it
comes to recommending each other for government grants. But I think anyone who looks at the matter closely will agree that some fields of science are moving forward very much faster than others, perhaps by an order of magnitude, if numbers could be put on such estimates. The discoveries leap from the headlines–and they are
real advances in complex and difficult subjects, like molecular biology and high-energy physics. As Alvin Weinberg
says1, “Hardly a month goes by without a stunning success in molecular biology being reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others?

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Perusse, D. (1993). Cultural and reproductive success in industrial societies: Testing the relationship at the proximate and ultimate levels. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 267-284.

The fundamental postulate of sociobiology is that individuals exploit favorable environments to increase their genetic representation in the next generation. The data on fertility differentials among contemporary humans are not cotvietent with this postulate. Given the importance of Homo sapiens as an animal species in the natural world today, these data constitute particularly challenging and interesting problem for both human sociobiology and sociobiology as a whole.

The first part of this paper reviews the evidence showing an inverse relationship between reproductive fitness and “endowment” (i.e. wealth, success, and measured aptitudes) in contemporary, urbanized societies. It is shown that a positive relationship is observed only for those cohorts who bore their children during a unique period of rising fertility, 1935–1960, and that these cohorts are most often cited by sociobiologists as supporting the central postulate of sociobiology. Cohorts preceding and following these show the characteristic inverse relationship between endowment and fertility. The second section reviews the existing so-ciobiological models of this inverse relationship, namely, those of Barkow, Burley, and Irons, as well as more informal responses among sociobiologists to the persistent violation of sociobiology’s central postulate, such as those of Alexander and Dawkins. The third section asks whether the goals of sociobiology, given the violation of its fundamental postulate by contemporary human societies, might not be better thought of as applied rather than descriptive, with respect to these societies. A proper answer to this question begins with the measurement of the pace and direction of natural selection within modern human populations, as compared to other sources of change. The vast preponderance of the shifts in human trait distributions, including the IQ distribution, appears to be due to environmental rather than genetic change. However, there remains the question of just how elastic these distributions are in the absence of reinforcing genetic change.

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MacDonald, K. (1992). Warmth as a developmental construct: An evolutionary analysis. Child Development, 63, 753-773.

This paper provides an evolutionary account of the human affectional system as indexed by the construct of warmth. It is argued that although warmth and security of attachment are often closely intertwined in actual relationships, warmth must be distinguished from security of attachment. Warmth is conceptualized as a reward system which evolved to facilitate cohesive family relationships and paternal investment in children

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Lopreato, J., & Yu, Mei-yu. (1988). Human fertility and fitness optimization. Ethology and Sociobiology , 9, 269-289.

Census and other survey data from across the world reveal major differences in fertility rates between the more economically developed and the less economically developed societies. The former are significantly more likely than the latter to feature families of two children or fewer. Multiple regression analysis shows that, among various indicators of “modernization,” three (female level of education, female gainful employment, and proportion of physicians in the population) account for 71% of the variation in family size; all three variables have strongly significant, direct, and negative effects on fertility. The paper hypothesizes about the possible evolution of a reproductive psychology toward the two-child family and seeks to explain highly depressed rates of reproduction by reference to both ultimate and proximate factors. In some highly developed countries, zero-child and one-child rates of fertility represent together up to 40% of all ever-married women. The findings stress the importance of systematic research toward establishing the proximate factors that are most likely to facilitate or impede fitness optimization—the importance, that is, of surrounding the optimization principle with the logic and ancillary propositions that will give it a greater and more directive reach.

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Langlois, J. H., Roggman, L. A. and Musselman, L. (1994). What is average and what is not average about attractive faces. Psychological Science, 5, 214-220.

We reported in this journal (Langlois & Roggman, 1990) findings showing that attractive faces are those that represent the mathematical average of faces in a population These findings were intriguing because they provided a parsimonious definition of facial attractiveness and because they supported explanations of attractiveness from the point of view of both evolutionary and cognitive-prototype theory Since our 1990 report, several alternative explanations of our findings have been offered In this article, we show that none of these alternatives explains our results adequately

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Langlois, J. H., & Roggman, L. A. (1990). Attractive faces are only average. Psychological Science, 1, 115-121.

Scientists and philosophers have searched for centuries for a parsimonious answer to the question of what constitutes beauty. We approached this problem from both an evolutionary and information-processing rationale and predicted that faces representing the average value of the population would be consistently judged as attractive. To evaluate this hypothesis, we digitized samples of male and female faces, mathematically averaged them, and had adults judge the attractiveness of both the individual faces and the computer-generated composite images. Both male (three samples) and female (three samples) composite faces were judged as more attractive than almost all the individual faces comprising the composites. A strong linear trend also revealed that the composite faces became more attractive as more faces were entered. These data showing that attractive faces are only average are consistent with evolutionary pressures that favor characteristics close to the mean of the population and with cognitive processes that favor prototypical category members.

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Kenrick, D. T., & Keefe, R. C. (1992). Age preferences in mates reflect sex differences in reproductive strategies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 75-133.

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Hamilton, W.D. (1963). The evolution of altruistic behavior. American Naturalist, 97, 354-356.

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Hamilton, W.D. (1964). The evolution of social behavior. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1-52.

For several years the study of social behavior has been undergoing a revolution with far-reaching consequences for the social and biological sciences. Partly responsible are three recent changes in the attitudes of evolutionary biologists. First was growing acceptance of the evidence that the potency of natural selection is overwhelmingly concentrated at levels no higher than that of the individual. Second was revival of the comparative method, especially as applied to behavior and life histories. Third was spread of the realization that not only are all aspects of structure and function of organisms to be understood solely as products of selection, but because of their
peculiarly direct relationship to the forces of selection, behavior and life history phenomena, long neglected by the evolutionists, may be among the most predictable of all phenotypic attributes.

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Haig, D. (1993). Genetic conflicts in human pregnancy. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 68 (4), 495-527.

Pregnancy has commonly been viewed as a cooperative interaction between a mother and her fetus. The effects of natural selection on genes expressed in fetuses, however, may be opposed by the effects of natural selection on genes expressed in mothers. In this sense, a genetic conflict can be said to exist between maternal and fetal genes. Fetal genes will be selected to increase the transfer of nutrients to their fetus, and maternal genes will be selected to limit transfers in excess of Soma maternal optimum. Thus a process of evolutionary escalation is predicted in which fetal actions are opposed by maternal countermeasures. The phenomenon of genomic imprinting means that a similar conflict exists within fetal cells between genes that are expressed when maternally derived, and genes that are expressed when paternally derived. During implantation, fetally derived cells (trophoblast) invade the maternal endometrium and remodel the endometrial spiral arteries into low-resistance vessels that are unable to constrict. This invasion has three consequences. First, the fetus gains direct access to its mother’s arterial blood. Therefore, a mother cannot reduce the nutrient content of blood reaching the placenta without reducing the nutrient supply to her own tissues. Second, the volume of blood reaching the placenta becomes largely independent of control by the local maternal vasculature. Third, the placenta is able to release hormones and other substances directly into the maternal circulation. Placental hormones, including human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) and human placental lactogen (hPL), are predicted to manipulate maternal physiology for fetal benefit. For example, hPL is proposed to act on maternal prolactin receptors to increase maternal resistance to insulin. If unopposed, the effect of hPL would be to maintain higher blood glucose levels for longer periods after meals. This action, however, is countered by increased maternal production of insulin. Gestational diabetes develops if the mother is unable to mount an adequate response to fetal manipulation. Similarly, fetal genes are Predicted to enhance the flow of maternal blood through the placenta by increasing maternal blood pressure. Preeclampsia can be interpreted as an attempt by a poorly nourished fetus to increase its supply of nutrients by increasing the resistance of its mother’s peripheral circulation.

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Gould, S. J., and Eldredge, N. (1993). Punctuated equilibrium comes of age. Nature, 366, 223-227.

The intense controversies that surrounded the youth of punctuated equilibrium have helped it mature to a useful extension of evolutionary theory. As a complement to phyletic gradualism, its most important implications remain the recognition of stasis as a meaningful and predominant pattern within the history of species, and in the recasting of macroevolution as the differential success of certain species (and their descendants) within clades.

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Gilbert, D. (1991). How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46 (2), 107-119.

Is there a difference between believing and merely understanding an idea? Descartes thought so. He considered the acceptance and rejection of an idea to be alternative outcomes of an effortful assessment process that occurs subsequent to the automatic comprehension of that idea. This article examined Spinoza’s alternative suggestion that (a) the acceptance of an idea is part of the automatic comprehension of that idea and (b) the rejection of an idea occurs subsequent to, and more effortfully than, its acceptance. In this view, the mental representation of abstract ideas is quite similar to the mental representation of physical objects: People believe in the ideas they comprehend, as quickly and automatically as they believe in the objects they see. Research in social and cognitive psychology suggests that Spinoza’s model may be a more accurate account of human belief than is that of Descartes.

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Gangestad, S. W. and Buss, D. M. (1993). Pathogen prevalence and human mate preferences. Ethology and Sociobiology, 14, 89-96.

Members of host species in pathogen-host coevolutionary races may be selected to choose mates who possess features of physical appearance associated with pathogen resistance. Human data from 29 cultures indicate that people in geographical areas carrying relatively greater prevalences of pathogens value a mate’s physical attractiveness more than people in areas with relatively little pathogen incidence. The relationship between pathogen prevalence and the value people place on physical attractiveness remained strong even after potential confounds such as distance from the equator, geographical region, and average income were statistically controlled for. Discussion focuses on potential limitations of the data, alternative explanations for the findings, and the nature of adaptions to the problems posed by pathogen prevalence.

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Gangestad, S. W., & Simpson, J. A. (1990). Toward an evolutionary history of female sociosexual variation. Journal of Personality, 58, 69-96.

Considerable progress has been made in behavioral genetics toward providing theoretical accounts of individual differences One theoretical task, however, has been largely neglected—that of constructing evolutionary accounts of behaviorally relevant genetic variance We attempt to address this task with respect to the genetic variance underlying sociosexuality, that is, the differences in the implicit prerequisites (in terms of time, attachment, commitment, etc) to entering a sexual relationship Specifically, we argue that genetic variance on this trait for females could have been maintained through frequency-dependent selection In our evolutionary past, restricted females-those who require relatively more time, attachment, and commitment-could have benefited through paternal investment in their offspring Unrestricted females—those who require relatively less time, attachment, and commitment—could have benefited through the quality of their mate’s genes passed on to their sons Moreover, the value of these alternate „strategies” could have been frequency-dependent One prediction that follows from this evolutionary history is tested and supported in three studies Those females genetically predisposed to be unrestricted are found to produce relatively more sons than females predisposed to be restricted Additional predictions are offered and alternative accounts are discussed

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Emlen, S.T. (1995). An evolutionary theory of the family. Procedures of The National Academy of Science, 92, 8092-8099.

An evolutionary framework for viewing the formation, the stability, the organizational structure, and the social dynamics of biological families is developed. This framework is based upon three conceptual pillars: ecological constraints theory, inclusive fitness theory, and reproductive skew theory. I offer a set of 15 predictions pertaining to living within family groups. The logic of each is discussed, and empirical evidence from family-living vertebrates is summarized. I argue that knowledge of four basic parameters, (i) genetic relatedness, (ii) social dominance, (iii) the benefits of group living, and (iv) the probable success of independent reproduction, can explain many aspects of family life in birds and mammals. I suggest that this evolutionary perspective will provide insights into understanding human family systems as well.

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Eldredge, N. and Gould, S. J. (1972). Punctuated equilibria: An alternative to phyletic gradualism. In: T. J. M. Schopf (Ed.). Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman, pp 82-115.

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Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In: J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (Eds.), The Adapted Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 163-228.

“Is it not reasonable to anticipate that our understanding of the human mind would be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed? ” GEORGE C. WILLIAMS

The human mind is the most complex natural phenomenon humans have yet encountered, and Darwin’s gift to those who wish to understand it is a knowledge of the process that created it and gave it its distinctive organization: evolution. Because we know that the human mind is the product of the evolutionary process, we know something vitally illuminating: that, aside from those properties acquired by chance, the mind consists of a set of adaptations, designed to solve the long-standing adaptive problems humans encountered as hunter-gatherers. Such a view is uncontroversial to most behavioral scientists when applied to topics such as vision or balance. Yet adaptationist approaches to human psychology are considered radical–or even transparently false-when applied to most other areas of human thought and action, especially social behavior. Nevertheless, the logic of the adaptationist postion is completely general, and a dispassionate evaluation of its implications leads to the expectation that humans should have evolved a constellation of cognitive adaptations to social life. Our
ancestors have been members of social groups and engaging in social interactions for millions and probably tens of millions of years. To behave adaptively, they not only needed to construct a spatial map of the objects disclosed to them by their retinas, but a social map of the persons, relationships, motives, interactions, emotions, and inten-
tions that made up their social world.

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Cavalli-Sforza, L. (1991). Genes, peoples and languages. Scientific American, 104-110.

The genetic history of a group of populations is usually analyzed by reconstructing a tree of their origins. Reliability of the reconstruction depends on the validity of the hypothesis that genetic differentiation of the populations is mostly due to population fissions followed by independent evolution. If necessary, adjustment for major population admixtures can be made. Dating the fissions requires comparisons with paleoanthropological and paleontological dates, which are few and uncertain. A method of absolute genetic dating recently introduced uses mutation rates as molecular clocks; it was applied to human evolution using microsatellites, which have a sufficiently high mutation rate. Results are comparable with those of other methods and agree with a recent expansion of modern humans from Africa. An alternative method of analysis, useful when there is adequate geographic coverage of regions, is the geographic study of frequencies of alleles or haplotypes. As in the case of trees, it is necessary to summarize data from many loci for conclusions to be acceptable. Results must be independent from the loci used. Multivariate analyses like principal components or multidimensional scaling reveal a number of hidden patterns and evaluate their relative importance. Most patterns found in the analysis of human living populations are likely to be consequences of demographic expansions, determined by technological developments affecting food availability, transportation, or military power. During such expansions, both genes and languages are spread to potentially vast areas. In principle, this tends to create a correlation between the respective evolutionary trees. The correlation is usually positive and often remarkably high. It can be decreased or hidden by phenomena of language replacement and also of gene replacement, usually partial, due to gene flow.

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Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Piazza, A., Menozzi, P., and Mountain, J. (1988). Reconstruction of human evolution: Bringing together genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data. Procedures of The National Academy of Science, 85, 6002-6006.

The genetic information for this work came from a very large collection of gene frequencies for “classical” (non-DNA) polymorphisms of the world aborigines. The data were grouped in 42 populations studied for 120 alleles. The reconstruction of human evolutionary history thus generated was checked with statistical techniques such as “boot-strapping”. It changes some earlier conclusions and is in agreement with more recent ones, including published and unpublished DNA-marker results. The first split in the phylogenetic tree separates Africans from non-Africans, and the second separates two major clusters, one corresponding to Caucasoids, East Asians, Arctic populations, and American natives, and the other to Southeast Asians (mainland and insular), Pacific islanders, and New Guineans and Australians. Average genetic distances between the most important clusters are proportional to archaeological separation times. Linguistic families correspond to groups of populations with very few, easily understood overlaps, and their origin can be given a time frame. Linguistic superfamilies show remarkable correspondence with the two major clusters, indicating considerable parallelism between genetic and linguistic evolution. The latest step in language development may have been an important factor determining the rapid expansion that followed the appearance of modern humans and the demise of Neanderthals.

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Buss, D. M. (1988). The evolution of human intrasexual competition: Tactics of mate attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 661-628.

Darwin’s theory of sexual selection suggests that individuals compete with members of their own sex for reproductively relevant resources held by members of the opposite sex. Four empirical studies were conducted to identify tactics of intrasexual mate competition and to test four evolution-based hypotheses. A preliminary study yielded a taxonomy of tactics. Study 1 used close-friend observers to report performance frequencies of 23 tactics to test the hypotheses. Study 2 replicated Study 1′s results by using a different data source and subject population. Study 3 provided an independent test of the hypotheses in assessing the perceived effectiveness of each tactic for male and female actors. Although the basic hypotheses were supported across all three studies, there were several predictive failures and unanticipated findings. Discussion centers on the heuristic as well as predictive role of evolutionary theory, and on implications for other arenas of intrasexual competition.

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Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., and Tellegen, A. (1990). Sources of Human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Science, 250, 223-228.

Since 1979, a continuing study of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, separated in infancy and reared apart, has subjected more than 100 sets of reared-apart twins or triplets to a week of intensive psychological and physiological assessment. Like the prior, smaller studies of monozygotic twins reared apart, about 70% of the variance in IQ was found to be associated with genetic variation. On multiple measures of personality and temperament, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes, monozygotic twins reared apart are about as similar as are monozygotic twins reared together. These findings extend and support those from numerous other twin, family, and adoption studies. It is a plausible hypothesis that genetic differences affect psychological differences largely indirectly, by influencing the effective environment of the developing child. This evidence for the strong heritability of most psychological traits, sensibly construed, does not detract from the value or importance of parenting, education, and other propaedeutic interventions.

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Bereczkei, T. & Dunbar, R. I. M. (1997). Female-biased reproductive strategies in two Gipsy populations. The Royal Society Proceedings 264, 17-22.

Hungarian Gypsy populations invest more heavily in daughters than in sons compared to co-resident Hungarians, in conformity with the predictions of the Trivers–Willard hypothesis. These effects are shown for four different measures of parental investment (sex ratio at birth, frequency of abortion, duration of breast-feeding and length of education). Opportunities for hypergamy into the wealthier Hungarian population appears to be one factor causing Gypsies to prefer daughters over sons. We show that differential investment by sex of offspring is directly related to the fitness pay-offs that accrue for each population through both sexes of offspring.

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Wallace, A. R. (1855). On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 26, 184-196.

Every naturalist who has turned his attention to the issue of geographical distribution of animals and plants must have been interested in the singular facts which it presents. Many of these facts are entirely different from what one would expect, and so far, have been considered very curious, but quite inexplicáveis.2 Today, none of the explanations attempted from the time of Linnaeus is considered quite satisfactory, none of which provided a sufficient cause to explain the known facts at the time and comprehensive enough to include all the new facts that since then have been daily acrescentados.3 In recent years, however, a great light has been shed on the subject by geological investigations, showing that the present state of the Earth, and bodies that currently inhabit, it is only the latest stage of a long and uninterrupted series of changes suffered by it, thus trying to explain and account for its present condition with no reference to these changes (as has frequently been done) must lead to conclusions very imperfect and errôneas.4

Full text in the first note on this article (click the title above to view the notes…)

Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural Language and Natural Selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 707-784.

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory — that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets this criterion: grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is
an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

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Nettle, D. (2006). The evolution of personality variation in humans and other animals. American Psychologist 61, 622-31.

A comprehensive evolutionary framework for understanding the maintenance of heritable behavioral variation in humans is yet to be developed. Some evolutionary psychologists have argued that heritable variation will not be found in important, fitness-relevant characteristics because of the winnowing effect of natural selection. This article propounds the opposite view. Heritable variation is ubiquitous in all species, and there are a number of frameworks for understanding its persistence. The author argues that each of the Big Five dimensions of human personality can be seen as the result of a trade-off between different fitness costs and benefits. As there is no unconditionally optimal value of these trade-offs, it is to be expected that genetic diversity will be retained in the population.

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Lieberman, D., Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2007). The architecture of human kin detection. Nature, 445, 727-731.

Evolved mechanisms for assessing genetic relatedness have been found in many species, but their existence in humans has been a matter of controversy. Here we report three converging lines of evidence, drawn from siblings, that support the hypothesis that kin detection mechanisms exist in humans. These operate by computing, for each familiar individual, a unitary regulatory variable (the kinship index) that corresponds to a pairwise estimate of genetic relatedness between self and other. The cues that the system uses were identified by quantitatively matching individual exposure to potential cues of relatedness to variation in three outputs relevant to the system’s evolved functions: sibling altruism, aversion to personally engaging in sibling incest, and moral opposition to third party sibling incest. As predicted, the kin detection system uses two distinct, ancestrally valid cues to compute relatedness: the familiar other’s perinatal association with the individual’s biological mother, and duration of sibling coresidence.

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Haselton, M. G., Mortezaie, M., Pillsworth, E. G., Bleske-Recheck, A. E., & Frederick, D. A. (2007). Ovulation and human female ornamentation: Near ovulation, women dress to impress. Hormones and Behavior, 51, 40-45.

Humans differ from many other primates in the apparent absence of obvious advertisements of fertility within the ovulatory cycle. However, recent studies demonstrate increases in women’s sexual motivation near ovulation, raising the question of whether human ovulation could be marked by observable changes in overt behavior. Using a sample of 30 partnered women photographed at high and low fertility cycle phases, we show that readily-observable behaviors – self-grooming and ornamentation through attractive choice of dress – increase during the fertile phase of the ovulatory cycle. At above-chance levels, 42 judges selected photographs of women in their fertile (59.5%) rather than luteal phase (40.5%) as “trying to look more attractive.” Moreover, the closer women were to ovulation when photographed in the fertile window, the more frequently their fertile photograph was chosen. Although an emerging literature indicates a variety of changes in women across the cycle, the ornamentation effect is striking in both its magnitude and its status as an overt behavioral difference that can be easily observed by others. It may help explain the previously documented finding that men’s mate retention efforts increase as their partners approach ovulation.

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Haselton M. G. & Buss, D. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 81-91.

A new theory of cognitive biases, called error management theory (EMT), proposes that psychological mechanisms are designed to be predictably biased when the costs of false-positive and false-negative errors were asymmetrical over evolutionary history. This theory explains known phenomena such as men’s overperception of women’s sexual intent, and it predicts new biases in social inference such as women’s underestimation of men’s commitment. In Study 1 (N = 217), the authors documented the commitment underperception effect predicted by EMT. In Study 2 (N = 289), the authors replicated the commitment bias and documented a condition in which men’s sexual overperception bias is corrected. Discussion contrasts EMT with the heuristics and biases approach and suggests additional testable hypotheses based on EMT.

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Haley, K. J. & Fessler, D. M. T. (2005). Nobodyís watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game. Evolution and Human Behavior 26(3), 245-256.

Models indicate that opportunities for reputation formation can play an important role in sustaining cooperation and prosocial behavior. Results from experimental economic games support this conclusion, as manipulating reputational opportunities affects prosocial behavior. Noting that some prosocial behavior remains even in anonymous noniterated games, some investigators argue that humans possess a propensity for prosociality independent of reputation management. However, decision-making processes often employ both explicit propositional knowledge and intuitive or affective judgments elicited by tacit cues. Manipulating game parameters alters explicit information employed in overt strategizing but leaves intact cues that may affect intuitive judgments relevant to reputation formation. To explore how subtle cues of observability impact prosocial behavior, we
conducted five dictator games, manipulating both auditory cues of the presence of others (via the use of sound-deadening earmuffs) and visual cues (via the presentation of stylized eyespots). Although earmuffs appeared to reduce generosity, this effect was not significant. However, as predicted, eyespots substantially increased generosity, despite no differences in actual anonymity; when using a computer displaying eyespots, almost twice as many participants gave money to their partners compared with the controls. Investigations of prosocial behavior must consider both overt information about game parameters and subtle cues influencing intuitive judgments.

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Frederick, D. A. & Haselton, M. G. (2007). Why is muscularity sexy? Tests of the fitness-indicator hypothesis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1167-1183.

Evolutionary scientists propose that exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics are cues of genes that increase offspring viability or reproductive success. In six studies the hypothesis that muscularity is one such cue is tested. As predicted, women rate muscular men as sexier, more physically dominant and volatile, and less committed to their mates than nonmuscular men. Consistent with the inverted-U hypothesis of masculine traits, men with moderate muscularity are rated most attractive. Consistent with past research on fitness cues, across two measures, women indicate that their most recent short-term sex partners were more muscular than their other sex partners (ds = .36, .47). Across three studies, when controlling for other characteristics (e.g., body fat), muscular men rate their bodies as sexier to women (partial rs = .49-.62) and report more lifetime sex partners (partial rs = .20-.27), short-term partners (partial rs = .25-.28), and more affairs with mated women (partial r = .28).

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Daly, M. & Wilson, M. (1988). Evolutionary social psychology and family homicide. Science 242, 519-524

Homicide is an extreme manifestation of interpersonal conflict with minimal reporting bias and can thus be used as a conflict “assay.” Evolutionary models of social motives predict that genetic relationship will be associated with mitigation of conflict, and various analyses of homicide data support this prediction. Most “family” homicides are spousal homicides, fueled by male sexual proprietariness. In the case of parent-offspring conflict, an evolutionary model predicts variations in the risk of violence as a function of the ages, sexes, and other characteristics of protagonists, and these predictions are upheld in tests with data on infanticides, parricides, and filicides.

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This study uses self-report measures completed by one hundred and twenty three (123) undergraduate technology students to investigate the validity of Peterson and Seligman’s (2004) classification system of 24 character strengths embodied in six core virtues. Using exploratory factor analyses we found, that an exact convergence of the character strengths was explicitly absent with the six-virtues. In our study, a five-factor solution was more comprehensive and well representing the resultant factor loadings upon analyzing the data which is further compared to a similar empirical study available for analyzing structural dynamics. In this paper, we have discussed the five-factor solution and renamed the dimensions to show a legitimate picture of the classification system, which requires further justification, and in addition, advocates reanalysis and reinterpretation of the originally propounded values in action (VIA) classification as a recommendation for future research.

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Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection: a selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53, 205–214.

It is suggested that characters which develop through mate preference confer handicaps on the selected individuals in their survival. These handicaps are of use to the selecting sex since they test the quality of the mate. The size of characters selected in this way serve as marks of quality. The understanding that a handicap, which tests for quality, can evolve as a consequence of its advantage to the individual, may provide an explanation for many puzzling evolutionary problems. Such an interpretation may provide an alternative to other hypotheses which assumed complicated selective mechanisms, such as group selection or kin selection, which do not act directly on the individual.

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Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (1996). Male sexual proprietariness and violence against wives. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 5, 2–7.

There is a cross-culturally ubiquitous connection between men’s sexual possessiveness and men’s violence…

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Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 27 PDF – Man: From sociobiology to sociology.

Wilson, D. S., & Sober, E. (1994). Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17, 585–654.

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970 but a positive literature began to grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as «replicators» which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be «vehicles» of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units. The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to «organs» of group-level «organisms.» Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals

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Waynforth, D. (1998). Fluctuating asymmetry and human male life-history traits in rural Belize. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 265B, 1497–1501.

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), used as a measure of phenotypic quality, has proven to be a useful predictor of human life-history variation, but nothing is known about its effects in humans living in higher fecundity and mortality conditions, typical before industrialization and the demographic transition. In this research, I analyse data on male life histories for a relatively isolated population in rural Belize. Some of the 56 subjects practise subsistence-level slash-and-burn farming, and others are involved in the cash economy. Fecundity levels are quite high in this population, with men over the age of 40 averaging over eight children. Low FA successfully predicted lower morbidity and more offspring fathered, and was marginally associated with a lower age at first reproduction and more lifetime sex partners. These results indicate that FA may be important in predicting human performance in fecundity and morbidity in predemographic transition conditions.

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Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man: 1871–1971 (pp. 136–179). Chicago: Aldine.

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Thornhill, R., Gangestad, S. W., & Comer, R. (1995). Human female orgasm and mate fluctuating asymmetry. Animal Behavior, 50, 1601–1615.

Human, Homo sapiens, female orgasm is not necessary for conception; hence it seems reasonable to hypothesize that orgasm is an adaptation for manipulating the outcome of sperm competition resulting from facultative polyandry. If heritable differences in male viability existed in the evolutionary past, selection could have favoured female adaptations (e.g. orgasm) that biased sperm competition in favour of males possessing heritable fitness indicators. Accumulating evidence suggests that low fluctuating asymmetry is a sexually selected male feature in a variety of species, including humans, possibly because it is a marker of genetic quality. Based on these notions, the proportion of a woman’s copulations associated with orgasm is predicted to be associated with her partner’s fluctuating asymmetry. A questionnaire study of 86 sexually active heterosexual couples supported this prediction. Women with partners possessing low fluctuating asymmetry and their partners reported significantly more copulatory female orgasms that were reported by women with partners possessing high fluctuating asymmetry and their partners, even with many potential confounding variables controlled. The findings are used to examine hypotheses for female orgasm other than selective sperm retention.

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Thornhill, R., & Gangestad, S. W. (1999). The scent of symmetry: A human sex phremone that signals fitness? Evolution and human behavior, 20, 175–201.

A previous study by the authors showed that the body scent of men who have greater body bilateral symmetry is rated as more attractive by normally ovulating (non-pill-using) women during the period of highest fertility based on day within the menstrual cycle. Women in low-fertility phases of the cycle and women using hormone-based contraceptives do not show this pattern. The current study replicated these findings with a larger sample and statistically controlled for men’s hygiene and other factors that were not controlled in the first study. The current study also examined women’s scent attractiveness to men and found no evidence that men prefer the scent of symmetric women. We propose that the scent of symmetry is an honest signal of phenotypic and genetic quality in the human male, and chemical candidates are discussed. In both sexes, facial attractiveness (as judged from photos) appears to predict body scent attractiveness to the opposite sex. Women’s preference for the scent associated with men’s facial attractiveness is greatest when their fertility is highest across the menstrual cycle. The results overall suggest that women have an evolved preference for sires with good genes.

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Shackelford, T. K., & Larsen, R. J. (1997). Facial asymmetry as an indicator of psychological, emotional,and physiological distress. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 456–466.

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is deviation from bilateral symmetry in morphological traits with asymmetry values that are normally distributed with a mean of 0. FA is produced by genetic or environmental perturbations of developmental design and may play a role in human sexual selection. K. Grammer and R. Thornhill (1994) found that facial FA negatively covaries with observer ratings of attractiveness, dominance, sexiness, and health. Using self-reports, observer ratings, daily diary reports, and psychophysiological measures, the authors assessed the relationship between facial FA and health in 2 samples of undergraduates (N = 101). Results partially replicate and extend those of K. Grammer and R. Thornhill (1994) and suggest that facial FA may signal psychological, emotional, and physiological distress. Discussion integrates the authors’ findings with previous research on FA and suggests future research needed to clarify the role of FA in human sexual selection.

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Rikowski, A., & Grammar, K. (1999). Human body odour, symmetry and attractiveness. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 266B, 869–874.

Several studies have found body and facial symmetry as well as attractiveness to be human mate choice criteria. These characteristics are presumed to signal developmental stability. Human body odour has been shown to influence female mate choice depending on the immune system, but the question of whether smell could signal general mate quality, as do other cues, was not addressed in previous studies. We compared ratings of body odour, attractiveness, and measurements of facial and body asymmetry of 16 male and 19 female subjects. Subjects wore a T-shirt for three consecutive nights under controlled conditions. Opposite-sex raters judged the odour of the T-shirts and another group evaluated portraits of the subjects for attractiveness. We measured seven bilateral traits of the subject’s body to assess body asymmetry. Facial asymmetry was examined by distance measurements of portrait photographs. The results showed a significant positive correlation between facial attractiveness and sexiness of body odour for female subjects. We found positive relationships between body odour and attractiveness and negative ones between smell and body asymmetry for males only if female odour raters were in the most fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The outcomes are discussed in the light of different male and female reproductive strategies.

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Rhodes, G., Zebrowitz, L. A., Clark, A., Kalick, M., Hightower, A., & McKay, R. (2001). Do facial averageness and symmetry signal health? Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 31–47.

We investigated whether the attractive facial traits of averageness and symmetry signal health, examining two aspects of signalling: whether these traits are perceived as healthy, and whether they provide accurate health information. In Study 1, we used morphing techniques to alter the averageness and symmetry of individual faces. Increases in both traits increased perceived health, and perceived health correlated negatively with rated distinctiveness (a converse measure of averageness) and positively with rated symmetry of the images. In Study 2, we examined whether these traits signal real, as well as perceived, health, in a sample of individuals for whom health scores, based on detailed medical records, were available. Perceived health correlated negatively with distinctiveness and asymmetry, replicating Study 1. Facial distinctiveness ratings of 17-year-olds were associated with poor childhood health in males, and poor current and adolescent health in females, although the last association was only marginally significant. Facial asymmetry of 17-year-olds was not associated with actual health. We discuss the implications of these results for a good genes account of facial preferences.

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Nesse, R. M., & Berridge, K. C. (1997). Psychoactive drug use in evolutionary perspective. Science, 278, 63–66.

Pure psychoactive drugs and direct routes of administration are evolutionarily novel features of our environment. They are inherently pathogenic because they bypass adaptive information processing systems and act directly on ancient brain mechanisms that control emotion and behavior. Drugs that induce positive emotions give a false signal of a fitness benefit. This signal hijacks incentive mechanisms of liking and wanting, and can result in continued use of drugs that no longer bring pleasure. Drugs that block negative emotions can impair useful defenses, although there are several reasons why their use is often safe nonetheless. A deeper understanding of the evolutionary origins and functions of the emotions and their neural mechanisms is needed as a basis for decisions about the use of psychoactive drugs.

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Murphy, D., & Stich, S. (2000). Darwin in the madhouse: evolutionary psychology and the classification of mental disorders. In P. Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (Eds.), Evolution and the human mind: Modularity, language and meta-cognition (pp. 62–92). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Recent years have witnessed a ground swell of interest in the application of evolutionary theory to issues in psychopathology (Nesse & Williams 1995, Stevens & Price 1996, McGuire & Troisi 1998). Much of this work has been aimed at finding adaptationist explanations for a variety of mental disorders ranging from phobias to depression to schizophrenia. There has, however, been relatively little discussion of the implications that the theories proposed by evolutionary psychologists might have for the classification of mental disorders. This is the theme we propose to explore. We’ll begin, in Section 1, by providing a brief overview of the account of the mind advanced by evolutionary psychologists. In Section 2 we’ll explain why issues of taxonomy are important and why the dominant approach to the classification of mental disorders is radically and alarmingly unsatisfactory. We will also indicate why we think an alternative approach, based on theories in evolutionary psychology, is particularly promising. In Section 3 we’ll try to illustrate some of the virtues of the evolutionary psychological approach to classification. The discussion in Section 3 will highlight a quite fundamental distinction between those disorders that arise from the malfunction of a component of the mind and those that can be traced to the fact that our minds must now function in environments that are very different from the environments in which they evolved. This
mis-match between the current and ancestral environments can, we maintain, give rise to serious mental disorders despite the fact that, in one important sense, there is nothing at all wrong with the people suffering the disorder. Their minds are functioning exactly as Mother Nature intended them to. In Section 4, we’ll give a brief overview of
some of the ways in which the sorts of malfunctions catalogued in Section 3 might arise, and sketch two rather different strategies for incorporating this etiologically information in a system for classifying mental disorders. Finally, in Section 5, we will explain why an evolutionary approach may lead to a quite radical revision in the classification of certain conditions. From an evolutionary perspective, we will argue, some of the disorders
recognized in standard manuals like DSM-IV may turn out not to be disorders at all. The people who have these conditions don’t have problems; they just cause problems!

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Moller, A. P., & Thornhill, R. (1998). Male parental care, differential parental investment by females and sexual selection. Animal Behavior, 55, 1507–1515.

Males play a variable parental role in reproduction, ranging from no male parental care to extensive male care. Females may acquire either direct or indirect fitness benefits from their mate choice, and direct fitness benefits include male parental care. Theoreticians have traditionally emphasized direct fitness benefits to females in species with extensive male parental care. We review the literature and show extensive variation in the patterns of male care, related to the attractiveness of males to females. At one extreme of this continuum, females invest differentially in parental care, investing more when paired with attractive males. The costs of female parental care and other aspects of parental investment may be balanced by benefits in terms of more attractive sons and/or more viable offspring. At the other extreme, in species with extensive direct fitness benefits, males with preferred sexual phenotypes provide the largest relative share of parental care. A comparative study of birds revealed that the extent of the differential female parental investment was directly related to the frequency of extra-pair paternity. Since extra-pair paternity may arise mainly as a consequence of female choice for indirect fitness benefits, this result supports our prediction that differential parental investment is prevalent in species where females benefit indirectly from their mate choice. The consequences for sexual selection theory of these patterns of male care in relation to male attractiveness are emphasized.

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Moller, A. P., Barbosa, A., Cuervo, J. J., de Lope, F., Merino, S., & Saino, N. (1998). Sexual selection and tail streamers in the barn swallow. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 265B, 409–414.

The functional significance of elongated, narrow tips of the tail feathers of certain birds, so-called tail streamers, has recently been discussed from an aerodynamic point of view, and the effects of sexual selection on such traits have been questioned. We review our long-term field studies using observational and experimental approaches to investigate natural and sexual selection in the barn swallow, Hirundo rustica, which has sexually size-dimorphic outermost tail feathers. Experimental manipulation of the length of the outermost tail feathers has demonstrated sexual selection advantages of tail elongation and disadvantages of tail shortening, with opposite effects for natural selection in terms of foraging efficiency, haematocrit and survival. These findings are contrary to the prediction of a general deterioration from both shortening and elongation, if the tail trait was determined solely by its effects on aerodynamic efficiency and flight manoeuvrability. Patterns of sexual selection in manipulated birds conform with patterns in unmanipulated birds, and selection differentials for different components of sexual selection in manipulated birds are strongly positively correlated with differentials in unmanipulated birds. Age and sex differences in tail length, and geographical patterns of sexual size dimorphism, are also consistent with sexual selection theory, but inconsistent with a purely natural selection advantage of long outermost tail feathers in male barn swallows.

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Miller, G. F. (1999). Evolution of music through sexual selection. In N. L. Wallin, M. Bjoern, & S. Brown (Eds.), The origins of music. Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

In The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex, Darwin (1871) devoted ten pages to bird song and six pages to human music, viewing both as outcomes of an evolutionary process called sexual selection. Darwin’s idea that most bird song functions as a courtship display to attract sexual mates has been fully supported by biological research (e.g. Catchpole & Slater, 1995), but his idea that human music evolved to serve the same function have been strangely neglected. Although there has been much written about the origins of human music (e.g. Blacking, 1987; Dissanayake, 1988, 1992; Knight, 1991; Rousseau, 1966; Storr, 1992; Tiger, 1992), very few theorists have taken a serious adaptationist approach to the question. Those who have, have usually searched in vain for music’s survival benefits for the individual or the group, overlooking Darwin’s compelling argument that music’s benefits were primarily reproductive, and best explained by the same sexual selection processes that shaped bird song. This chapter has the simple goal of reviving Darwin’s original suggestions that human music must be studied as a biological adaptation, and that music was shaped by sexual selection to function mostly as a courtship display to attract sexual partners. Fortunately, after a century of obscurity, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection itself has already undergone a renaissance in biology over the last two decades, so biology offers many new insights about courtship adaptations, which will be applied here to human music.

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Mealey, L. (1995). The sociobiology of sociopathy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, 523–599.

Sociopaths are “outstanding” members of society in two senses: politically, they draw our attention because of the inordinate amount of crime they commit, and psychologically, they hold our fascination because most ofus cannot fathom the cold, detached way they repeatedly harm and manipulate others. Proximate explanations from behavior genetics, child development, personality theory, learning theory, and social psychology describe a complex interaction of genetic and physiological risk factors with demographic and micro environmental variables that predispose a portion of the population to chronic antisocial behavior. More recent, evolutionary and game theoretic models have tried to present an ultimate explanation of sociopathy as the expression of a frequency-dependent life strategy which is selected, in dynamic equilibrium, in response to certain varying environmental circumstances. This paper tries to integrate the proximate, developmental models with the ultimate, evolutionary ones, suggesting that two developmentally different etiologies of sociopathy emerge from two different evolutionary mechanisms. Social strategies for minimizing the incidence of sociopathic behavior in modern society should consider the two different etiologies and the factors that contribute to them.

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Marks, I. M., & Nesse, R. M. (1994). Fear and fitness: An evolutionary analysis of anxiety disorders. Ethology and Sociobiology, 15, 247–261.

This article reviews the evolutionary origins and functions of the capacity for anxiety, and relevant clinical and research issues. Normal anxiety is an emotion that helps organisms defend against a wide variety of threats. There is a general capacity for normal defensive arousal, and subtypes of normal anxiety protect against particular kinds of threats. These normal subtypes correspond somewhat to mild forms of various anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders arise from dysregulation of normal defensive responses, raising the possibility of a hypophobic disorder (too little anxiety). If a drug were discovered that abolished all defensive anxiety, it could do harm as well as good. Factors that have shaped anxiety-regulation mechanisms can explain prepotent and prepared tendencies to associate anxiety more quickly with certain cues than with others. These tendencies lead to excess fear of largely archaic dangers, like snakes, and too little fear of new threats, like cars. An understanding of the evolutionary origins, functions, and mechanisms of anxiety suggests new questions about anxiety disorders.

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Lovejoy, O. C. (1988). The evolution of human walking. Scientific American, 259, 118–125.

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Lovejoy, O. C. (1981). The origins of man. Science, 211, 341–349.

Five characters separate man from other hominoids—a large neocortex, bipedality, reduced anterior dentition with molar dominance, material culture, and unique sexual and reproductive behavior. Evidence provided by the fossil record, primate behavior, and demographic analysis shows that the traditional view that early human evolution was a direct consequence of brain expansion and material culture is incorrect, and that the unique sexual and reproductive behavior of man may be the sine qua non of human origin.

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Lloyd, J. E. (1979). Mating behavior and natural selection. The Florida Entomologist, 62, 17–34.

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Lewontin, R. C. (1998). The evolution of cognition. In D. Scarborough & S. Sternberg (Eds.), An invitation to cognitive science: Methods, models, and conceptual issues (pp. 107–132). Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

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Leary, M. R., Tambor, E. S., Terdal, S. K., & Downs, D. L. (1995). Self-esteem as an interpersonal monitor: The sociometer hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 518–530.

Five studies tested hypotheses derived from the sociometer model of self-esteem according to which the self-esteem system monitors others’ reactions and alerts the individual to the possibility of social exclusion. Study 1 showed that the effects of events on participants’ state self-esteem paralleled their assumptions about whether such events would lead others to accept or reject them. In Study 2, participants’ ratings of how included they felt in a real social situation correlated highly with their self-esteem feelings. In Studies 3 and 4, social exclusion caused decreases in self-esteem when respondents were excluded from a group for personal reasons, but not when exclusion was random, but this effect was not mediated by self-presentation. Study 5 showed that trait self-esteem correlated highly with the degree to which respondents generally felt included versus excluded by other people. Overall, results provided converging evidence for the sociometer model

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Kenrick, D. T., Sadalla, E. K., Groth, G., & Trost, M. R. (1990). Evolution, traits, and the stages of human courtship: Qualifying the parental investment model. Journal of Personality, 58, 97–116.

Individual differences are explicitly connected to social interaction in Darwin’s notion of sexual selection Traits that increase the probability of successful reproduction will tend to increase in frequency This process operates partly through differential choice, by one sex, of certain traits in the other According to the parental investment model, females frequently have more stringent criteria for the traits they will accept in a mate because they have a relatively larger investment in each offspring Because human mating arrangements often involve a substantial commitment of resources by the male, it is necessary to invoke a distinction between the selectivity involved during casual mating opportunities and the selectivity exercised when choosing a long-term partner Ninety-three undergraduate men and women rated their minimum criteria on 24 partner characteristics at four levels of commitment In line with an unqualified parental investment model, females were more selective overall, particularly on status-linked variables In line with a qualified parental investment model, males’ trait preferences depended upon the anticipated investment in the relationship Males had lower requirements for a sexual partner than did females, but were nearly as selective as females when considenng requirements for a long-term partner

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Kempenaers, B., Lanctot, R. B., & Robertson, R. J. (1998). Certainty of paternity and paternal investment in eastern blue birds and tree swallows. Animal Behavior, 55, 845–860.

Extra-pair paternity is common in many socially monogamous passerine birds with biparental care. Thus, males often invest in offspring to which they are not related. Models of optimal parental investment predict that, under certain assumptions, males should lower their investment in response to reduced certainty of paternity. We attempted to reduce certainty of paternity experimentally in two species, the eastern bluebird, Sialia sialis, and the tree swallow, Tachycineta bicolor, by temporarily removing fertile females on two mornings during egg laying. In both species, experimental males usually attempted to copulate with the female immediately after her reappearance, suggesting that they experienced the absence of their mate as a threat to their paternity. Experimental males copulated at a significantly higher rate than control males. However, contrary to the prediction of the model, experimental males did not invest less than control males in their offspring. There was no difference between experimental and control nests in the proportion of male feeds, male and female feeding rates, nestling growth and nestling condition and size at age 14 days. We argue that females might have restored the males’ confidence in paternity after the experiment by soliciting or accepting copulations. Alternatively, males may not reduce their effort, because the fitness costs to their own offspring may outweigh the benefits for the males, at least in populations where females cannot fully compensate for reduced male investment.

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Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behavior: I. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1–16.

A genetical mathematical model is described which allows for interactions between relatives on one another’s fitness. Making use of Wright’s Coefficient of Relationship as the measure of the proportion of replica genes in a relative, a quantity is found which incorporates the maximizing property of Darwinian fitness. This quantity is named “inclusive fitness”. Species following the model should tend to evolve behaviour such that each organism appears to be attempting to maximize its inclusive fitness. This implies a limited restraint on selfish competitive behaviour and possibility of limited self-sacrifices.

Special cases of the model are used to show (a) that selection in the social situations newly covered tends to be slower than classical selection, (b) how in populations of rather non-dispersive organisms the model may apply to genes affecting dispersion, and (c) how it may apply approximately to competition between relatives, for example, within sibships. Some artificialities of the model are discussed.

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Haig, B. D., & Durrant, R. (2000). Theory evaluation in evolutionary psychology. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 34–38.

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Gross, M. R. (1996). Alternative reproductive strategies and tactics: Diversity within sexes. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 11, 92–98.

Not all members of a sex behave in the same way. Frequency- and status-dependent selection have given rise to many alternative reproductive phenotypes within the sexes. The evolution and proximate control of these alternatives are only beginning to be understood. Although game theory has provided a theoretical framework, the concept of the mixed strategy has not been realized in nature, and alternative strategies are very rare. Recent findings suggest that almost all alternative reproductive phenotypes within the sexes are due to alternative tactics within a conditional strategy, and, as such, while the average fitnesses of the alternative phenotypes are unequal, the strategy is favoured in evolution. Proximate mechanisms that underlie alternative phenotypes may have many similarities with those operating between the sexes.

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Greiling, H., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Women’s sexual strategies: The hidden dimension of extra-pair mating. Personality and Individual Differences, 28, 929–963.

Most evolutionary theories of human mating have focused on the adaptive benefits of short-term mating for men. Men cannot pursue a strategy of short-term mating, however, without willing women. Existing empirical evidence suggests that some women engage in short-term mating some of the time and probably have done so recurrently over human evolutionary history. The current studies tested hypotheses about the potential benefits women might derive from engaging in one type of short-term mating — extra-pair liaisons — and the contexts in which they do so. These include resource hypotheses (e.g. immediate resource accrual), genetic hypotheses (e.g. having genetically diverse offspring), mate switching hypotheses (e.g. acquiring a better mate), mate skill acquisition hypotheses (e.g. mate preference clarification) and mate manipulation hypotheses (e.g. deterring a partner’s future infidelity). These hypotheses were tested by examining the perceived likelihood that women would receive particular benefits through a short-term extra-pair mating (Study 1); the perceived magnitude of benefits if received (Study 2); the contexts in which women engage in short-term extra-pair mating (Study 3); and individual differences among women in proclivity to pursue short-term matings in their perceptions of benefits (Study 4). Most strongly supported across all four studies were the mate switching and resource acquisition hypotheses. Discussion focuses on the distinction between functions and beneficial effects of short-term mating, limitations of the current studies and the consequences of women’s short-term mating strategies for the broader matrix of human mating.

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Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: Acritique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 205B, 581–598.

An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past 40 years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an oragnism into unitary ‘traits’ and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately. Trade-offs among competing selective demands exert the only brake upon perfection; non-optimality is thereby rendered as a result of adaptation as well. We criticize this approach and attempt to reassert a competing notion (long popular in continental Europe) that organisms must be analysed as integrated wholes, with Baupläne so constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development and general architecture that the constraints themselves become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs. We fault the adaptationist programme for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin (male tyrannosaurs may have used their diminutive front legs to titillate female partners, but this will not explain why they got so small); for its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; for its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales; and for its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of non-adaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features (allometry, pleiotropy, material compensation, mechanically forced correlation), the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of non-adaptive structures. We support Darwin’s own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change.

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Gigerenzer, G. (1998). Surrogates for theories. Theory and Psychology, 8, 195–204.

I first discuss several strategies that serve as surrogates for theories in psychology: one-word explanation, redescription, drawing vague dichotomies, and data fitting. I then identify two conventions that allow these surrogates to flourish and multiply: null hypothesis testing, which makes precise hypotheses irrelevant, and the isolation of research in different disciplines, which prevents the exchange of positive metaphors between fields. Key Words: explanation, null hypothesis testing, redescription, surrogates, theory construction. I like conference dinners. At such a dinner several years ago, I was crammed in with four graduate students and four professors around a table laden with Chinese food. The graduate students were eager to learn first-hand how to complete a dissertation and begin a research career, and the professors were keen to give advice. With authority, one colleague advised them: “Don’t think big. Just do four or five experiments, clip them together, and hand them in. ” The graduate students nodded gratefully. They continued to nod when I added: “Don’t follow this advice unless you are mediocre or unimaginative. Try to think in a deep, bold, and precise way. Take risks and be courageous. ” What a dilemma. How could these students apply these contradictory pieces of advice?

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Geary, D. C. (2000). Evolution and proximate expression of human paternal investment. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 55–77.

In more than 95% of mammalian species, males provide little direct investment in the well-being of their offspring. Humans are one notable exception to this pattern and, to date, the factors that contributed to the evolution and the proximate expression of human paternal care are unexplained (T. H. Clutton-Brock, 1989). The nature, extent, and influence of human paternal investment on the physical and social well-being of children are reviewed in light of the social and ecological factors that are associated with paternal investment in other species. On the basis of this review, discussion of the evolution and proximate expression of human paternal investment is provided.

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Gangestad, S. W., & Thornhill, R. (1998). Menstrual cycle variation in women’s preferences for the scent of symmetrical men. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 265B, 927–933.

Evidence suggests that female sexual preferences change across the menstrual cycle. Women’s extra-pair copulations tend to occur in their most fertile period, whereas their intra-pair copulations tend to be more evenly spread out across the cycle. This pattern is consistent with women preferentially seeking men who evidence phenotypic markers of genetic benefits just before and during ovulation. This study examined whether women’s olfactory preferences for men’s scent would tend to favour the scent of more symmetrical men, most notably during the women’s fertile period. College women sniffed and rated the attractiveness of the scent of 41 T-shirts worn over a period of two nights by different men. Results indicated that normally cycling (non-pill using) women near the peak fertility of their cycle tended to prefer the scent of shirts worn by symmetrical men. Normally ovulating women at low fertility within their cycle, and women using a contraceptive pill, showed no significant preference for either symmetrical or asymmetrical men’s scent. A separate analysis revealed that, within the set of normally cycling women, individual women’s preference for symmetry correlated with their probability of conception, given the actuarial value associated with the day of the cycle they reported at the time they smelled the shirts. Potential sexual selection processes and proximate mechanisms accounting for these findings are discussed.

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Gangestad, S. W., & Simpson, J. A. (2000). The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 573–644.

During human evolutionary history, there were trade-offs between expending time and energy on child-rearing and mating, so both men and women evolved conditional mating strategies guided by cues signaling the circumstances. Many short-term matings might be successful for some men; others might try to find and keep a single mate, investing their effort in rearing her offspring. Recent evidence suggests that men with features signaling genetic benefits to offspring should be preferred by women as short-term mates, but there are trade-offs between a mate’s genetic fitness and his willingness to help in child-rearing. It is these circumstances and the cues that signal them that underlie the variation in short- and long-term mating strategies between and within the sexes.

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Furlow, F. B., Armijo-Prewitt, T., Gangestad, S. W., & Thornhill, R. (1997). Fluctuating asymmetry and psychometric intelligence. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 264B, 823–829.

Little is known about the genetic nature of human psychometric intelligence (IQ), but it is widely assumed that IQ’s heritability is at loci for intelligence per se. We present evidence consistent with a hypothesis that interindividual IQ differences are partly due to heritable vulnerabilities to environmental sources of developmental stress, an indirect genetic mechanism for the heritability of IQ. Using fluctuating asymmetry (FA) of the body (the asymmetry resulting from errors in the development of normally symmetrical bilateral traits under stressful conditions), we estimated the relative developmental instability of 112 undergraduates and administered to them Cattell’s culture fair intelligence test (CFIT). A subsequent replication on 128 students was performed. In both samples, FA correlated negatively and significantly with CFIT scores. We propose two non-mutually exclusive physiological explanations for this correlation. First, external body FA may correlate negatively with the developmental integrity of the brain. Second, individual energy budget allocations and/or low metabolic efficiency in high-FA individuals may lower IQ scores. We review the data on IQ in light of our findings and conclude that improving developmental quality may increase average IQ in future generations.

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Folstad, I., & Karter, A. J. (1992). Parasites, bright males, and the immunocompetence handicap. The American Naturalist, 139, 603–622.

It has been argued that [female][female] should be able to choose parasite-resistant mates on the basis of the quality of [male] secondary sexual characters, and that such signals must be costly handicaps in order to evolve. To a large extent, handicap hypotheses have relied on energetic explanations for these costs. This paper presents a phenomenological model, operating at an intraspecific level, which views the cost of secondary sexual development in endocrinological terms. Testosterone has a dual effect: it stimulates development of characters used in sexual selection while reducing immunocompetence. This creates a physiological trade-off that influences and is influenced by the parasite burden. It is proposed that there is a negative feedback loop between signal intensity and parasite burden, and that testosterone-dependent signal intensity is a plastic response. This response is modified in accordance with the competing demands of the potential costs of parasite infection vs. that of increased reproductive success afforded by exaggerated signals. This trade-off is intimately involved in the evolution of secondary sexual characters, and may explain some of the equivocal empirical results that have surfaced in attempts to measure the effect of parasites on sexual selection.

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Ellis, B. J., & Garber, J. (2000). Psychosocial antecedents of pubertal maturation in girls: Parental psychopathology, stepfather presence, and family and martial stress. Child Development, 71,485–501.

Drawing on Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper’s evolutionary theory of the development of reproductive strategies, we tested a model of individual differences in girls’ pubertal timing. This model posits that a history of psychopathology in mothers results in earlier pubertal maturation in daughters, and that this effect is mediated by discordant family relationships and father absence/stepfather presence. The model was supported in a short-term longitudinal study of 87 adolescent girls. In the primary test of the model, it was found that a history of mood disorders in mothers predicted earlier pubertal timing in daughters, and this relation was fully mediated by dyadic stress and biological father absence. In families in which the mother’s romantic partner was not the biological father, dyadic stress accounted for almost half of the variation in daughters’ pubertal timing. Stepfather presence, rather than biological father absence, best accounted for earlier pubertal maturation in girls living apart from their biological fathers. We propose that stepfather presence and stressful family relationships constitute separate paths to early pubertal maturation in girls.

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Ellis, B. J. (1992). The evolution of sexual attraction: Evaluative mechanisms in women. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 267–288). New York: Oxford University Press.

GOOGLE BOOKS – INCOMPLETE (but you’ll get some of it…)

Eberhard, W. G. (1993). Evaluating models of sexual selection: Genitalia as a test case. The American Naturalist, 142,564–571.

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Draper, P., & Harpending, H. (1988). A sociobiological perspective on the development of human reproductive strategies. In K.B. MacDonald (Ed.), Sociobiological perspectives on human development (pp. 340–372). New York: Springer-Verlag.

Humans show a great deal of variability in their reproductive behavior, including types of sexual activity, types of ties between males and females, and ways of arranging for the rearing of offspring. We will consider three principal topics: (1) Father absence versus father presence, contrasting children who are reared in a family system in which there is a closely involved and economically contributing father in contrast to a family system in which women rear their children in cooperation with other women (usually kin) and without consistent help from a man who is father to children. (2) Peer rearing versus parent rearing, concerning who does the primary work of rearing children—whether biological parents themselves and in a proximate sense provide for the care of their own children or whether parental surrogates do the major child tending work under some form of distal parental supervision. (3) Pair-bonding between parents versus individual strategies that do not include reciprocation with a mate, with a view toward understanding several psychiatric “disorders” as manifestations of more general evolved propensities against cooperation.

In the first two cases we discuss the consequences which being reared under one or the other of these conditions can have for the individual’s reproductive strategy. For simplicity we portray the conditions as dichotomous alternatives but we recognize that in actual life individual experience can vary along a continuum from one to the other. There are data on these topics, and evolutionary theory can help us understand these patterns in a way that takes account both of environmental differences among groups and the evolved characteristics of our species.

The evidence about why some adults seem to prefer to bond with one individual of the opposite sex while others mate in quite different contexts is quite sketchy. We will discuss characteristics of sociopaths and hysterics, individuals with clusters of traits identified by psychiatrists and usually interpreted as victims of mental illnesses. We will point out that these trait clusters seem to make good sense when considered in the light of the evolutionary theory of reproductive strategies, even though there is no good evidence of learning or of effects of rearing environment on their development.

Our view of learning is that humans have been selected to be differentially sensitive to certain cues in their immediate early childhood environment (Bowlby 1969, 1973; Lumsden & Wilson, 1981; MacDonald, 1984). It is as if human young acquire early socialization with their antennae tuned to detect certain attributes in their environment, especially the role played by mother’s mate and the mother’s attitude to her mate(s), and the role of parents as opposed to nonparental surrogates in providing proximate care in early childhood. These are examples of contextual variables which influence learning tracks in early childhood and which can be understood in the context of our evolutionary past.

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DeKay, W. T., & Buss, D. M. (1992). Human nature, individual differences, and the importance of context: Perspectives from evolutionary psychology. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1, 184–189.

Evolutionary psychology is emerging as an important theoretical perspective in many branches ofpsychology: cognition,’ perception, psycholinguistics, social psychology,’ developmental psychology, clinical psychology, and personality psychology. Its promise lies not insupplanting other psychological perspectives or research programs, but rather in adding additional layers of analysis and understanding to human psychological phenomena. Evolutionary psychology starts by posing three important questions that have been relatively neglected over the past century: What are the origins of human psychological mechanisms? What adaptive problems selected for their existence? What functions were they designed to serve?

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Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London: John Murray.

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Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: John Murray.

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Buunk, A. P., Angleitner, A., Oubaid, V., & Buss, D. M. (1996). Sex differences in jealousy in evolutionary and cultural perspective: Tests from the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. Psychological Science, 7, 359–363.

As predicted by models derived from evolutionary psychology, men within the United States have been shown to exhibit greater psychological and physiological distress to sexual than to emotional infidelity of their partner, and women have been shown to exhibit more distress to emotional than to sexual infidelity Because cross-cultural tests are critical for evolutionary hypotheses, we examined these sex differences in three parallel studies conducted in the Netherlands (N = 207), Germany (N = 200), and the United States (N = 224) Two key findings emerged First, the sex differences in sexual jealousy are robust across these cultures, providing support for the evolutionary psychological model Second, the magnitude of the sex differences varies somewhat across cultures—large for the United States, medium for Germany and the Netherlands Discussion focuses on the evolutionary psychology of jealousy and on the sensitivity of sex differences in the sexual sphere to cultural input

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Buss, D. M., & Shackelford, T. K. (1997). From vigilance to violence: Mate retention tactics in married couples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 346–361.

Although much research has explored the adaptive problems of mate selection and mate attraction, little research has investigated the adaptive problem of mate retention. We tested several evolutionary psychological hypotheses about the determinants of mate retention in 214 married people. We assessed the usage of 19 mate retention tactics ranging from vigilance to violence. Key hypothesized findings include the following: Men’s, but not women’s, mate retention positively covaried with partner’s youth and physical attractiveness. Women’s, but not men’s, mate retention positively covaried with partner’s income and status striving. Men’s mate retention positively covaried with perceived probability of partner’s infidelity. Men, more than women, reported using resource display, submission and debasement, and intrasexual threats to retain their mates. Women, more than men, reported using appearance enhancement and verbal signals of possession. Discussion includes an evolutionary psychological analysis of mate retention in married couples.

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Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100, 204–232.

This article proposes a contextual-evolutionary theory of human mating strategies. Both men and women are hypothesized to have evolved distinct psychological mechanisms that underlie short-term and long-term strategies. Men and women confront different adaptive problems in short-term as opposed to long-term mating contexts. Consequently, different mate preferences become activated from their strategic repertoires. Nine key hypotheses and 22 predictions from Sexual Strategies Theory are outlined and tested empirically. Adaptive problems sensitive to context include sexual accessibility, fertility assessment, commitment seeking and avoidance, immediate and enduring resource procurement, paternity certainty, assessment of mate value, and parental investment. Discussion summarizes 6 additional sources of behavioral data, outlines adaptive problems common to both sexes, and suggests additional contexts likely to cause shifts in mating strategy.

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Buss, D. M., Larsen, R., Westen, D., & Semmelroth, J. (1992). Sex differences in jealousy: Evolution, physiology, and psychology. Psychological Science, 3, 251–255.

In species with internal female fertilization, males risk both lowered paternity probability and investment in rival gametes if their mates have sexual contact with other males. Females of such species do not risk lowered maternity probability through partner infidelity, but they do risk the diversion of their mates’ commitment and resources to rival females. Three studies tested the hypothesis that sex differences in jealousy emerged in humans as solutions to the respective adaptive problems faced by each sex. In Study 1, men and women selected which event would upset them more—a partner’s sexual infidelity or emotional infidelity. Study 2 recorded physiological responses (heart rate, electrodermal response, corrugator supercilii contraction) while subjects imagined separately the two types of partner infidelity. Study 3 tested the effect of being in a committed sexual relationship on the activation of jealousy. All studies showed large sex differences, confirming hypothesized sex linkages in jealousy activation.

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Buss, D. M., Haselton, M. G., Shackelford, T. K., Bleske, A. L., & Wakefield, J. C. (1998). Adaptation, exaptations, and spandrels. American Psychologist, 53, 533–548.

Adaptation and natural selection are central concepts inthe emerging science of evolutionary psychology. Natural selection is the only known causal process capable ofproducing complex functional organic mechanisms. These adaptations, along with their incidental by-prod-ucts and a residue of noise, comprise all forms of life. Recently, S. J. Gould (1991) proposed that exaptationsand spandrels may be more important than adaptationsfor evolutionary psychology. These refer to features thatdid not originally arise for their current use but ratherwere co-opted for new purposes. He suggested that manyimportant phenomena–such as art, language, com-merce, and war–although evolutionary in origin, areincidental spandrels of the large human brain. The au-thors outline the conceptual and evidentiary standardsthat apply to adaptations, exaptations, and spandrels anddiscuss the relative utility of these concepts for psychological science.

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Buss, D. M., & Dedden, L. A. (1990). Derogation of competitors. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 7, 395–422.

Verbal signals are sometimes used to manipulate the impressions that people form about oneself and others. For the goal of self-enhancement, one can manipulate impressions either by elevating oneself or by derogating others. Five hypotheses about derogation of same-sex competitors were generated from an evolutionary model of human-mate competition. These hypotheses focused on sex differences in the importance that humans attach to external resources, rank, achievements, physical prowess, reproductive value and fidelity. Four studies were conducted to test these hypotheses. In a preliminary study (N = 80), subjects nominated intrasexual derogation tactics they had previously observed. Study 1 (N = 120) examined estimates of the likelihood that men and women would perform each tactic. Study 2 (N = 101) identified the perceived effectiveness of each derogation tactic for men and women. Study 3 (N = 100) used act reports based on self-recording and observer-recording to identify the likelihood of specific persons performing each derogation tactic. Although there were variations across studies and several anomalies, results generally supported the hypotheses based on an evolutionary model of human intrasexual mate competition. Discussion focuses on the importance of discourse and impression manipulation in the evolution of human competition.

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Buss, D. M. (1995). Evolutionary psychology: A new paradigm for psychological science. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 1–49.

Psychological science is currently in conceptual disarray, characterized by unconnected mini-theories and isolated empirical findings. We lack a theory of the functional properties of the human mind that could provide the needed integration—a theory about what the mechanisms of mind are “designed” to do. Evolutionary psychology provides the conceptual tools for emerging from this fragmented state. In this target article, I outline the fundamental premises of evolutionary psychology; illustrate the application of evolutionary psychology to domains such as reasoning, social exchange, language, aggression, jealousy, sex, and status; and then consider the implications of evolutionary psychology for the key branches of social, personality, developmental, and cognitive psychology and suggest ways in which these disciplinary boundaries can be transcended. I conclude by looking at the emergence of evolutionary psychology as our field matures into the 21st century.

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Buss, D. M. (1991). Evolutionary personality psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 45, 459–491.

A new discipline is emerging called “evolutionary psychology.” Its central aim is to identify psychological mechanisms and behavioral strategies as evolved solutions to the adaptive problems our species has faced over millions of years. Because personality psychology is dedicated to studying human nature in all of its individually different manifestations, this field is uniquely positioned to contribute to, and become informed by, evolutionary
psychology. This review differs from previous ones in articulating an evolutionary metatheory to organize the diverse strands of current personality research and to clarify many of its core concerns. These include: clarifying the debate about personality consistency, clarifying the causal status of dispositions, understanding interactionism, identifying important features of context, identifying the structure of goal-directed strategies, explaining the origins of individual differences, and placing the five-factor model of personality in adaptive context. In clarifying these issues, several crucial misunderstandings must be corrected the “sociobiological fallacy,” the “fundamental situational error,” and the “fallacy of genetic determinism.”

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Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12, 1–49.

Contemporary mate preferences can provide important clues to human reproductive history. Little is known about which characteristics people value in potential mates. Five predictions were made about sex differences in human mate preferences based on evolutionary conceptions of parental investment, sexual selection, human reproductive capacity, and sexual asymmetries regarding certainty of paternity versus maternity. The predictions centered on how each sex valued earning capacity, ambition— industriousness, youth, physical attractiveness, and chastity. Predictions were tested in data from 37 samples drawn from 33 countries located on six continents and five islands (total N = 10,047). For 27 countries, demographic data on actual age at marriage provided a validity check on questionnaire data. Females were found to value cues to resource acquisition in potential mates more highly than males. Characteristics signaling reproductive capacity were valued more by males than by females. These sex differences may reflect different evolutionary selection pressures on human males and females; they provide powerful cross-cultural evidence of current sex differences in reproductive strategies. Discussion focuses on proximate mechanisms underlying mate preferences, consequences for human intrasexual competition, and the limitations of this study.

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Belsky, J., Steinberg, L., & Draper, P. (1991). Childhood experience, interpersonal development, and reproductive strategy: An evolutionary theory of socialization. Child Development, 62, 647–670.

The concept of “reproductive strategy” drawn from the field of behavioral ecology is applied to the study of childhood experience and interpersonal development in order to develop an evolutionary theory of socialization. The theory is presented in terms of 2 divergent development pathways considered to promote reproductive success in the contexts in which they have arisen. One is characterized, in childhood, by a stressful rearing environment and the development of insecure attachments to parents and subsequent behavior problems; in adolescence by early pubertal development and precocious sexuality; and, in adulthood, by unstable pair bonds and limited investment in child rearing, whereas the other is characterized by the opposite. The relation between this theory and prevailing theories of socialization, specifically, attachment, social-learning, and discrete-emotions theory, is considered and research consistent with our evolutionary theory is reviewed. Finally, directions for future research are discussed.

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Baker, R. R., & Bellis, M. A. (1993). Human sperm competition: Ejaculate manipulation by females and a function for the female orgasm. Animal Behavior, 46, 887–909.

Behavioural ecologists view monogamy as a subtle mixture of conflict and cooperation between the sexes. In part, conflict and cooperation is cryptic, taking place within the female’s reproductive tract. In this paper the cryptic interaction for humans was analysed using data from both a nationwide survey and counts of sperm inseminated into, and ejected by, females. On average, 35% of sperm were ejected by the female within 30 min of insemination. The occurrence and timing of female orgasm in relation to copulation and male ejaculation influenced the number of sperm retained at both the current and next copulation. Orgasms that climaxed at any time between 1 min before the male ejaculated up to 45 min after led to a high level of sperm retention

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Andersson, M. (1982). Female choice selects for extreme tail length in a widowbird. Nature, 299,818–820.

Darwin’s1 hypothesis that male secondary sexual ornaments evolve through female preferences is theoretically plausible2?7, but there is little experimental field evidence that such preferences exist8?10. I have studied female choice in relation to male tail length in the long-tailed widowbird, Euplectes progne, and report here that males in which the tail was experimentally elongated showed higher mating success than males having normal or reduced tails. The possibility that intrasexual competition among males maintains the long tail was not supported: males with shortened tails held their territories as long as did other males. These results suggest that the extreme tail length in male long-tailed widowbirds is maintained by female mating preferences.

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Gomez, R. L., Bootzin, R. R., & Nadel, L. (2006). Naps Promote Abstraction in Language-Learning Infants. Psychological Science, 17(8), 670-67

Infants engage in an extraordinary amount of learning during their waking hours even though much of their day is consumed by sleep. What role does sleep play in infant learning? Fifteen-month-olds were familiarized with an artificial language 4 hr prior to a lab visit. Learning the language involved relating initial and final words in auditory strings by remembering the exact word dependencies or by remembering an abstract relation between initial and final words. One group napped during the interval between familiarization and test. Another group did not nap. Infants who napped appeared to remember a more abstract relation, one they could apply to stimuli that were similar but not identical to those from familiarization. Infants who did not nap showed a memory effect. Naps appear to promote a qualitative change in memory, one involving greater flexibility in learning.

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Newton, A. M., Villiers, J. G. (2007). Thinking While Talking: Adults Fail Nonverbal False-Belief Reasoning. Psychological Science, 18(7), 574-579.

This experiment tested the ability of 81 adult subjects to make a decision on a simple nonverbal false-belief reasoning task while concurrently either shadowing prerecorded spoken dialogue or tapping along with a rhythmic shadowing track. Our results showed that the verbal task, but not tapping, significantly disrupted false-belief reasoning, suggesting that language plays a key role in working theory of mind in adults, even when the false-belief reasoning is nonverbal.

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Weger, U. W., Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., Inhoff, A. W. (2007). Things are sounding up: Affective influences on auditory tone perception. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(3), 517-521.

Recent studies have documented robust and intriguing associations between affect and performance in cognitive tasks. The present two experiments sought to extend this line of work with reference to potential cross-modal effects. Specifically, the present studies examined whether word evaluations would bias subsequent judgments of low- and high-pitch tones. Because affective metaphors and related associations consistently indicate that positive is high and negative is low, we predicted and found that positive evaluations biased tone judgment in the direction of high-pitch tones, whereas the opposite was true of negative evaluations. Effects were found on accuracy rates, response biases, and reaction times. These effects occurred despite the irrelevance of prime evaluations to the tone judgment task. In addition to clarifying the nature of these cross-modal associations, the present results further the idea that affective evaluations exert large effects on perceptual judgments related to verticality.

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Toro, J. M., Nespor, M., Mehler, J., Bonatti, L. L. (2008). Finding Words and Rules in a Speech Stream: Functional Differences Between Vowels and Consonants. Psychological Science, 19(2), 137-144.

We have proposed that consonants give cues primarily about the lexicon, whereas vowels carry cues about syntax. In a study supporting this hypothesis, we showed that when segmenting words from an artificial continuous stream, participants compute statistical relations over consonants, but not over vowels. In the study reported here, we tested the symmetrical hypothesis that when participants listen to words in a speech stream, they tend to exploit relations among vowels to extract generalizations, but tend to disregard the same relations among consonants. In our streams, participants could segment words on the basis of transitional probabilities in one tier and could extract a structural regularity in the other tier. Participants used consonants to extract words, but vowels to extract a structural generalization. They were unable to extract the same generalization using consonants, even when word segmentation was facilitated and the generalization made simpler. Our results suggest that different signal-driven computations prime lexical and grammatical processing.

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Schon, D., Peretz, I., Besson, M., Boyer, M., Kolinsky, R., & Moreno, S. (2008). Songs as an aid for language acquisition. Cognition, 106 (2), 975-983

In previous research, Saffran and colleagues [Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926–1928; Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606–621.] have shown that adults and infants can use the statistical properties of syllable sequences to extract words from continuous speech. They also showed that a similar learning mechanism operates with musical stimuli [Saffran, J. R., Johnson, R. E. K., Aslin, N., & Newport, E. L. (1999). Abstract Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults. Cognition, 70, 27–52.]. In this work we combined linguistic and musical information and we compared language learning based on speech sequences to language learning based on sung sequences. We hypothesized that, compared to speech sequences, a consistent mapping of linguistic and musical information would enhance learning. Results confirmed the hypothesis showing a strong learning facilitation of song compared to speech. Most importantly, the present results show that learning a new language, especially in the first learning phase wherein one needs to segment new words, may largely benefit of the motivational and structuring properties of music in song.

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Lea, R. B., Rapp, D. N., Elfenbein, A., Mitchel, A. D., & Swinburne Romine, R. (2008). Sweet Silent Thought: Alliteration and Resonance in Poetry Comprehension. Psychological Science, 19 (7), 709-716

Poetic devices like alliteration can heighten readers’ aesthetic experiences and enhance poets’ recall of their epic pieces. The effects of such devices on memory for and appreciation of poetry are well known; however, the mechanisms underlying these effects are not yet understood. We used current theories of language comprehension as a framework for understanding how alliteration affects comprehension processes. Across three experiments, alliterative cues reactivated readers’ memories for previous information when it was phonologically similar to the cue. These effects were obtained when participants read aloud and when they read silently, and with poetry and prose. The results support everyday intuitions about the effects of poetry and aesthetics, and explain the nature of such effects. These findings extend the scope of general memory models by indicating their capacity to explain the influence of nonsemantic discourse features.

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Iverson, J. M., Capirci, O., Volterra, V., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008). Learning to talk in a gesture-rich world: Early communication in Italian vs. American children. First Language, 28 (2), 164-181

Italian children are immersed in a gesture-rich culture. Given the large gesture repertoire of Italian adults, young Italian children might be expected to develop a larger inventory of gestures than American children. If so, do these gestures impact the course of language learning? We examined gesture and speech production in Italian and US children between the onset of first words and the onset of two-word combinations. We found differences in the size of the gesture repertoires produced by the Italian vs. the American children, differences that were inversely related to the size of the children’s spoken vocabularies. Despite these differences in gesture vocabulary, in both cultures we found that gesture + speech combinations reliably predicted the onset of two-word combinations, underscoring the robustness of gesture as a harbinger of linguistic development.

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Becker, M. W., Pashler, H., Lubin, J. (2007). Object-Intrinsic Oddities Draw Early Saccades. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33(1), 20-30.

The authors investigated whether anomalous information in the periphery of a scene attracts saccades when the anomaly is not distinctive in its low-level visual properties. Subjects viewed color photographs for 8 s while their eye movements were monitored. Each subject saw 2 photographs of different scenes. One photograph was a control scene in which familiar objects appeared in their canonical form. In the other picture, objects were altered in a way that rendered them deviant without introducing any obvious changes in low-level visual saliency. In Experiment 1, these alterations involved rotating an object in an unnatural fashion (e.g., an inverted head on a portrait, a truck parked on its front end). In Experiment 2, colors were distributed over objects in a way that was either reasonable or anomalous (e.g., a green cup vs. a green hand). Subjects fixated the anomalous items earlier (both in time and in order of fixations) than the nondistorted objects, suggesting that violations of canonical form are detected peripherally and can affect the likelihood of fixating an item.

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Kimchi, R., & Peterson, M. A. (2008). Figure-Ground Segmentation Can Occur Without Attention Psychological Science, 19 (7), 660-668

The question of whether or not figure-ground segmentation can occur without attention is unresolved. Early theorists assumed it can, but the evidence is scant and open to alternative interpretations. Recent research indicating that attention can influence figure-ground segmentation raises the question anew. We examined this issue by asking participants to perform a demanding change-detection task on a small matrix presented on a task-irrelevant scene of alternating regions organized into figures and grounds by convexity. Independently of any change in the matrix, the figure-ground organization of the scene changed or remained the same. Changes in scene organization produced congruency effects on target-change judgments, even though, when probed with surprise questions, participants could report neither the figure-ground status of the region on which the matrix appeared nor any change in that status. When attending to the scene, participants reported figure-ground status and changes to it highly accurately. These results clearly demonstrate that figure-ground segmentation can occur without focal attention.

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Arnell, K. A., Killman, K. V., & Fijavz, D. (2007). Blinded by emotion: Target misses follow attention capture by arousing distractors in RSVP. Emotion, 7(3), 465-477.

Participants are usually able to search rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams and report a single target, given that RSVP distractors do not typically deplete attention required for target identification. Here, participants performed single target search, but the target was preceded by a to-be-ignored distractor varying in valence and arousal. When the critical distractor was a sexual word, lower target accuracy was observed, particularly at short distractor–target stimulus onset asynchronies, even when participants were shown the critical distractors beforehand and told to ignore them. No reduction in target accuracy was evidenced when the critical distractor was negative, positive, threatening, or emotionally neutral. Target accuracy was predicted by participants’ arousal ratings to the critical distractor words and by their memory for them, but not by their valence ratings. Memory for critical distractors mediated the relationship between arousal and target accuracy. The results provide evidence that arousing sexual words involuntarily capture attention and enter awareness at the expense of goal-driven targets, at least in the context of laboratory experiments performed by young university participants for whom sexual material might have high impact and relevance.

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McVay, J. C., & Kane, M. J. (2009). Conducting the train of thought: Working memory capacity, goal neglect, and mind wandering in an executive-control task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35 (1), 196-204.

On the basis of the executive-attention theory of working memory capacity (WMC; e.g., M. J. Kane, A. R. A. Conway, D. Z. Hambrick, & R. W. Engle, 2007), the authors tested the relations among WMC, mind wandering, and goal neglect in a sustained attention to response task (SART; a go/no-go task). In 3 SART versions, making conceptual versus perceptual processing demands, subjects periodically indicated their thought content when probed following rare no-go targets. SART processing demands did not affect mind-wandering rates, but mind-wandering rates varied with WMC and predicted goal-neglect errors in the task; furthermore, mind-wandering rates partially mediated the WMC-SART relation, indicating that WMC-related differences in goal neglect were due, in part, to variation in the control of conscious thought.

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