Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions

Evolutionary 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. By human nature, evolutionary psychologists mean the evolved, reliably developing, species-typical computational and neural architecture of the human mind and brain. 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). Evolutionary psychology is not a specific subfield of psychology, such as the study of vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it including the emotions.