Kelly Asao

Human Emotions: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective

Evolutionary approaches to the emotions have traditionally focused on a subset of emotions that are shared with other species, characterized by distinct signals, and designed to solve a few key adaptive problems. By contrast, an evolutionary psychological approach (a) broadens the range of adaptive problems emotions have evolved to solve, (b) includes emotions that lack distinctive signals and are unique to humans, and (c) synthesizes an evolutionary approach with an information-processing perspective. On this view, emotions are superordinate mechanisms that evolved to coordinate the activity of other programs in the solution of adaptive problems. We illustrate the heuristic value of this approach by furnishing novel hypotheses for disgust and sexual arousal and highlighting unexplored areas of research.

Evolutionary psychology: A how-to guide.

Researchers in the social and behavioral sciences are increasingly using evolutionary insights to test novel hypotheses about human psychology. Because evolutionary perspectives are relatively new to psychology and most researchers do not receive formal training in this endeavor, there remains ambiguity about “best practices” for implementing evolutionary principles. This article provides researchers with a practical guide for using evolutionary perspectives in their research programs and for avoiding common pitfalls in doing so. We outline essential elements of an evolutionarily informed research program at 3 central phases: (a) generating testable hypotheses, (b) testing empirical predictions, and (c) interpreting results. We elaborate key conceptual tools, including task analysis, psychological mechanisms, design features, universality, and cost-benefit analysis. Researchers can use these tools to generate hypotheses about universal psychological mechanisms, social and cultural inputs that amplify or attenuate the activation of these mechanisms, and cross-culturally variable behavior that these mechanisms can produce. We hope that this guide inspires theoretically and methodologically rigorous research that more cogently integrates knowledge from the psychological and life sciences.

The Tripartite Theory of Machiavellian Morality: Judgment, Influence, and Conscience as Distinct Moral Adaptations

Morality encompasses complex, multidimensional phenomena spanning diverse content areas. In this chapter, we propose a tripartite theory of Machiavellian morality in which moral judgment, moral influence, and moral conscience are functionally distinct moral adaptations. Moral judgment is an adaptation designed to determine how exploitative or benefit-bestowing a conspecific is and to use that information when choosing relationship partners. Moral influence is designed to identify the most cost-effective means of altering the future behavior of others to be less cost-inflicting and more benefit-bestowing. Moral conscience is an adaptation designed to guide one’s own behavior toward others to strategically avoid ramifications from other’s moral judgment and influence mechanisms. Two examples, sexual infidelity and property theft, are used to illustrate the application of a tripartite framework of Machiavellian morality. Finally, we discuss the potential for this framework to clarify the ambiguity within morality literature and to refocus attention on novel areas of research.