i use emotion for the many and reason for the few

Indeed, a rich theory of the emotions naturally emerges out of the core principles of evolutionary psychology (Tooby 1985 Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a see also Nesse, 1991). The analysis of adaptive problems that arose ancestrally has led evolutionary psychologists to apply the concepts and methods of the cognitive sciences to scores of topics that are relevant to the study of emotion, such as the cognitive processes that govern cooperation, sexual attraction, jealousy, aggression, parental love, friendship, romantic love, the aesthetics of landscape preferences, coalitional aggression, incest avoidance, disgust, predator avoidance, kinship, and family relations (for reviews, see Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992 Crawford & Krebs, 1998 Daly & Wilson, 1988 Pinker, 1997). It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it - including the emotions. Evolutionary psychology is not a specific subfield of psychology, such as the study of vision, reasoning, or social behavior.

According to this view, the functional components that comprise this architecture were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and to regulate behavior so that these adaptive problems were successfully addressed (for discussion, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1987, Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). By human nature, evolutionary psychologists mean the evolved, reliably developing, species-typical computational and neural architecture of the human mind and brain. Please contact the publisher directly for permission to reprint.Įvolutionary psychology is an approach to the psychological sciences in which principles and results drawn from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology, and neuroscience are integrated with the rest of psychology in order to map human nature. Posted only for scholarly/educational use. Haviland-Jones, Editors.Ĭopyright 2000 Leda Cosmides and John ToobyĬaution: The print version may differ in minor respects from this draft.

I use emotion for the many and reason for the few