Evolutionary psychology

Identifying the conditions of proxy treadmilling is crucial for determining whether reliable signals can persist over time. I present a framework that maps evolutionary models of reliable signals according to their assumptions regarding the effects of Goodhart's law. This framework can explain the contrasting outcomes of different modelling approaches, and identify in which models proxy treadmilling is expected to occur.

A considerable amount of research has revealed that there exists an evolutionary mismatch between ancestral environments and conditions following the rise of agriculture regarding the contact between humans and animal reservoirs of infectious diseases. Based on this evolutionary mismatch framework, we examined whether visual attention exhibits adaptive attunement toward animal targets' pathogenicity. Consistent with our predictions, faces bearing heuristic infection cues held attention to a greater extent than did animal vectors of zoonotic infectious diseases...

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to examine the complex nature of opioid use disorder (OUD) in chronic noncancer pain (CNCP) by exploring its antecedents, attributes, consequences, and interrelated concepts. DESIGN: A systematic literature review was conducted to gather relevant studies published between 2015 and 2022, utilizing the CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and PubMed databases. DATA SOURCES: The selected databases provided a comprehensive range of articles related to OUD in CNCP, ensuring a comprehensive topic analysis...

While virtually all suicide attempters experience ideations, not all who think about suicide will attempt or die by suicide. The ideation-to-action framework has led to new theories distinguishing suicide ideators from suicide attempters. The framework suggests that suicide progresses on a spectrum of thoughts and behaviors with different identifiers and explanations. The concept of acquired capability for suicide (ACS), conceptualized by the Interpersonal Psychological Theory of Suicide, is the first to explain the movement from ideation to action...

BACKGROUND: Social anxiety (SA) is characterized by concerns about the expected occurrence (probability) and anticipated distress (cost) of social threats. Unclear is whether SA correlates specifically with biased expectations of belongingness or status threats. AIMS: We aimed to discern if SA is uniquely tied to biased expectancies of either belongingness or status threats. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We assessed 757 participants' perceptions of exclusion and put-down scenarios, analysing associations between SA and threat perceptions...

Individual survival and evolutionary selection require biological organisms to maximize reward. Economic choice theories define the necessary and sufficient conditions, and neuronal signals of decision variables provide mechanistic explanations. Reinforcement learning (RL) formalisms use predictions, actions, and policies to maximize reward. Midbrain dopamine neurons code reward prediction errors (RPE) of subjective reward value suitable for RL. Electrical and optogenetic self-stimulation experiments demonstrate that monkeys and rodents repeat behaviors that result in dopamine excitation...

Piloerection (e.g., goosebumps) is an essential thermoregulatory and social signaling mechanism in non-human animals. Although humans also experience piloerection-often being perceived as an indicator of profound emotional experiences-its comparatively less effective role in thermoregulation and communication might influence our capacity to monitor its occurrence. We present three studies (total N = 617) demonstrating participants' general inability to detect their own piloerection events and their lack of awareness that piloerection occurs with a similar frequency on multiple anatomical locations...

INTRODUCTION: The literature suggests that people can accurately infer dark triad (DT) personality traits from other peoples' faces. Using a self-report scale, this study investigated the impact of participants' DT personality traits on their ability to accurately infer other peoples' DT traits from facial cues. METHODS: We created composite facial photographs of Japanese people with varying Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism scores. The Japanese participants ( N  = 170) assessed these three DT traits in the facial photographs and completed a questionnaire that assessed their own DT traits...

For most primates living in tropical forests, food resources occur in patchworks of different habitats that vary seasonally in quality and quantity. Efficient navigation (i.e., spatial memory-based orientation) towards profitable food patches should enhance their foraging success. The mechanisms underpinning primate navigating ability remain nonetheless mostly unknown. Using GPS long-term tracking (596 days) of one group of wild western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), we investigated their ability to navigate at long distances, and tested for how the sun was used to navigate at any scale by improving landmark visibility and/or by acting as a compass...

Previous models suggest that indirect reciprocity (reputation) can stabilize large-scale human cooperation [K. Panchanathan, R. Boyd, Nature 432 , 499-502 (2004)]. The logic behind these models and experiments [J. Gross et al. , Sci. Adv. 9 , eadd8289 (2023) and O. P. Hauser, A. Hendriks, D. G. Rand, M. A. Nowak, Sci. Rep. 6 , 36079 (2016)] is that a strategy in which individuals conditionally aid others based on their reputation for engaging in costly cooperative behavior serves as a punishment that incentivizes large-scale cooperation without the second-order free-rider problem...

As a powerful social signal, a body, face, or gaze facing toward oneself holds an individual's attention. We asked whether, going beyond an egocentric stance, facingness between others has a similar effect and why. In a preferential-looking time paradigm, human adults showed spontaneous preference to look at two bodies facing toward (vs. away from) each other (Experiment 1a, N = 24). Moreover, facing dyads were rated higher on social semantic dimensions, showing that facingness adds social value to stimuli (Experiment 1b, N = 138)...

BACKGROUND: Childhood harshness and unpredictability significantly shape life history strategies, as well as downstream psychological and behavioral patterns. However, prior research involving Chinese populations has suffered from inconsistent metrics and limited measurement items. OBJECTIVE: We adapted the English version of Maranges et al.'s (2022) Harshness and Unpredictability Scale in Childhood, translating it into Chinese and assessing its reliability and validity...

Spontaneous, unwilled subjective imagery and symbols (including dreams) often emerge in psychotherapy that can appear baffling and confound interpretation. Early psychoanalytic theories seemed to diverge as often as they agreed on the meaning of such content. Nevertheless, after reviewing key findings in the empirical science of spontaneous thought as well as insights gleaned from neuroscience and especially embodied cognition, it is now possible to construct a more coherent theory of interpretation that is clinically useful...

Evolutionary psychology is the study of human psychological behavior. During childhood, men and women behave similarly; however, as a child approaches puberty, new physical and behavioral changes emerge. Behavioral psychology focuses on understanding the functioning and thought processes of the human mind. The general population lacks knowledge of basic behavioral differences between men and women, leaving them unaware of their role, limitations, societal responsibilities, resulting in an underestimation of their own natural talents and biology...

The face plays an important role in human interactions, and the periorbital region is particularly important to allow recognition and attractiveness. There are several studies on the beauty of the periorbital region using a variety of methodologies, but few articles consider the attractiveness factors derived from evolutionary psychology such as symmetry, dimorphism, age and average, neoteny and facial expression. The aim of this study is to identify periorbital attractiveness criteria in Caucasian women based on experimental studies and to interpret them in the light of studies on biological attractiveness factors...

A foundational mechanism underlying human cooperation is reciprocity. In the context of repeated interactions with others, it is not always clear the degree to which in-kind responses reflect responsiveness to partners' prior behaviors ("reactive" responses), an interest unrelated to the partner ("nonreactive" responses), or any combination of the two. To disentangle these two types of responses, we presented children with sequential, one-shot, and costly interactions between themselves and either egalitarian or selfish peers...

Dunbar's number is the cognitive limit of human beings to maintain stable relationships with other individuals in their social networks, and it is found to be 150. It is based on the neocortex size of humans. Usually, Dunbar's number and related phenomena are studied from the perspective of an individual. Dunbar's number also plays a crucial role in evolutionary psychology and allied areas. However, no study done so far has considered a couple who are in a stable relationship as a system from the perspective of Dunbar's number and its hierarchy layers...

More than a century ago, Darwin proposed a putative role for music in sexual attraction (i.e., sex appeal), a hypothesis that has recently gained traction in the field of music psychology. In his writings, Darwin particularly emphasized the charming aspects of music. Across a broad range of cultures, music has a profound impact on humans' feelings, thoughts and behavior. Human mate choice is determined by the interplay of several factors. A number of studies have shown that music and musicality (i.e., the ability to produce and enjoy music) exert a positive influence on the evaluation of potential sexual partners...

In simple terms, consciousness is constituted by multiple goals for action and the continuous adjudication of such goals to implement action, which is referred to as the maps of meaning (MoM) consciousness theory. The MoM theory triangulates through three parallel corollaries: action (behavior), mechanism (morphology/pathophysiology), and goals (teleology). (1) An organism's consciousness contains fluid, nested goals. These goals are not intentionality, but intersectionality, via the Darwinian byproduct of embodiment meeting the world, i...

The evolution of cognition can be understood in terms of a few major transitions-changes in the computational architecture of nervous systems that changed what cognitive capacities could be evolved by downstream lineages. We demonstrate how the idea of a major cognitive transition can be modeled in terms of where a system's effective computational architecture falls on the well-studied hierarchy of formal automata (HFA). We then use recent work connecting artificial neural networks to the HFA, which provides a way to make the structure-architecture link in natural systems...