Analyzing 'Evolutionary Functional Analysis' in Evolutionary Psychology

O16: How Do Concepts of Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychiatry Explain Anxiety Disorders?

Our ancestors without fear, worry and anxiety are not our ancestors, as organisms without defense systems were extinct. Therefore, while behavior such as fear and anxiety are useful to prevent harm, the exaggerated form, that is, anxiety disorders, has more costs than benefits. Likewise, while a panic attack is a normal and useful response in the face of life-threatening danger, a panic disorde...

Evolutionary forensic psychology—p. 1 Toward an Evolutionary Forensic Psychology

Most theories of crime have not explored intensively biological and especially evolutionary explanations for criminal behavior. Ellis presents a valuable new perspective that proposes that physiological mechanisms shaped by evolutionary forces can provide insights into the causes of crime and sex differences in the patterns of crime. We discuss other theories and research relevant to Ellis’s th...

Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology

Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology1 Evolutionary cognitive psychology

Traditional cognitive psychology, the study of the information processing mechanisms underlying human thought and behavior, is problematic from an evolutionary viewpoint: Humans were not directly selected to process information, nor to store it, learn it, attend to it, represent it—nor even, in fact, to think. All of these capacities, the core topics of cognitive psychology, can be seen as epip...

A Note on Evolutionary Rate Estimation in Bayesian Evolutionary Analysis: Focus on Pathogens

Bayesian evolutionary analysis provide a statistically sound and flexible framework for estimation of evolutionary parameters. In this method, posterior estimates of evolutionary rate (μ) are derived by combining evolutionary information in the data with researcher’s prior knowledge about the true value of μ. Nucleotide sequence samples of fast evolving pathogens that are taken at d...