Wiktionary
n. (context psychology English) A theoretical approach to psychology that attempts to explain mental and psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection.
Wikipedia
Evolutionary psychology (EP) is a theoretical approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological structure from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the modularity of mind is similar to that of the body and with different modular adaptations serving different functions. Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that EP is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology but that evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that integrates the entire field of psychology in the same way evolution has for biology.
Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations including the abilities to infer others' emotions, discern kin from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, and cooperate with others. They report successful tests of theoretical predictions related to such topics as infanticide, intelligence, marriage patterns, promiscuity, perception of beauty, bride price, and parental investment.
The theories and findings of EP have applications in many fields, including economics, environment, health, law, management, psychiatry, politics, and literature.
Criticism of evolutionary psychology involves questions of testability, cognitive and evolutionary assumptions (such as modular functioning of the brain, and large uncertainty about the ancestral environment), importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues due to interpretations of research results.
Evolutionary Psychology is a peer-reviewed open access academic journal published since 2003. It covers empirical, philosophical, historical, and socio-political aspects of evolutionary psychology. Its editors-in-chief are Todd K. Shackelford ( Oakland University), Bernhard Fink ( University of Göttingen), David A. Puts ( Pennsylvania State University), and Rebecca Sear ( London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). In 2015 the journal moved to Sage Publications.
The journal is abstracted and indexed in Social Sciences Citation Index, and Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Usage examples of "evolutionary psychology".
Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything-evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing-it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms.
That book made the case, based on evolutionary psychology, that rape was indeed a reproductive strategy—.