Lecture 10

Question 1

What is the basic premise of evolutionary psychology?

Answer 1

That humans are a product of an evolutionary process and so therefore are our mental and physical characteristics.

Question 2

What are these characteristics considered to be?

Answer 2

Adaptations to either our current or previous environments. Physical characteristics remain because they have not been selected out in the time since we last lived in those ancestral environments.

Question 3

What does evolutionary psychology concern itself with?

Answer 3

Describing these adaptations and placing them within an evolutionary context.

Question 4

Out of the western, eastern gorrilla, bonobo and chimpanzee - which are grouped together?

Answer 4

Western and eastern gorrilla together and bonobo and chimpanzee together

Question 5

Why do we analyse humans next to related species?

Answer 5

To try and gain inferences about characteristics of common ancestor. Then we can use this to ‘reverse engineer’

Question 6

What is David Buss’s evolutionary psychology: the new science of the mind composed of?

Answer 6

Cutting edge research and features an engaging writing style that draws students into the critical topics.

Question 7

Who is David buss?

Answer 7

One of the foremost researchers in evolutionary psychology.

Question 8

What does the text do?

Answer 8

It logically progresses by discussing adaptive problems that humans face including those of survival, mating, parenting, kinship and group living (e.g. Cooperation, aggression and status hierarchies)

Question 9

What does it include?

Answer 9

More cognitive material integrated throughout
Compelling case stories, media and cultural examples and illustrations and applications to the personal lives of students.

Question 10

What’s the most substantial topic?

Answer 10

Sex and mating - makes up about 30% of the book

Question 11

What are typical participation comments in journals?

Answer 11

Participants were 170 undergraduates at a university in the Midwestern USA, who received extra credit for their participation.

175 male and 311 female University of Alberta undergraduates participated in this study and received credit toward their introductory psychology class for their participation.

We conducted an act-nomination study of sixty undergraduates (44% male, Mage = 21.66, SDage = 2.52, rangeage = 19 - 35) from a large public university in the south western USA.

One hundred and forty students (89 women and 51 men; mean age ± SD = 19.49 ± 1.15) from a Midwestern liberal arts college.

Eighty undergraduate students at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Participants were 83 students from Miami University who received partial course credit for their participation.

The 633 participants in our study consisted of 198 males (average age 22.1 ± SD 2.7 years) and 435 females (average age 21.5 ± SD 2.7 years) from various universities.

Participants were recruited from introductory level psychology classes at the University at Albany

Question 12

What are most journals based on?

Answer 12

80% based on questionnaire studies completed by undergraduate students.

Question 13

What is a typical hypothesis based on?

Answer 13

Loosely based on evolutionary principles

Question 14

What is data subject to?

Answer 14

Complex analyses. Statistical significance given precedence over other considerations.

Question 15

What are theories related to risk of kissing?

Answer 15

Maternal premastication.
Mate assessment
Bonding
Preparation for intercourse.

Question 16

What is Occam’s razor?

Answer 16

The principle that where there are two competing explanations, the simplest is usually correct.

Question 17

What does HCMV stand for?

Answer 17

Human Cytomegalovirus

Question 18

What are risks from kissing?

Answer 18

Exposure to contagious diseases

Exposure to endemic infection

Question 19

What are the two factors that cause lack of insight?

Answer 19

No overarching paradigm for psychology
No full zoological description of our species. (We know lots about anatomy, physiology, distribution and genetics but very little about behaviour)

Question 20

What are the four ornament displays?

Answer 20

Genetic quality
Current disease state
Damage from earlier infection
Freedom from development adversity

Question 21

What are the morphology signals and what do they give?

Answer 21

Rich source of information and they are: 
Sex-differences 
Skin 
Hair 
Eyes 
Nose 
Teeth 
Lips 
Breasts
Waist 
Hips 
Gluteofemoral fat stores 
Fermin length

Question 22

What does breast morphology signal?

Answer 22

Future ability to suckle
Age/residual value
Current/previous pregnancies
Current fat stores/previous periods of restricted food availability (stretch marks)
Resistance to disease (asymmetry associated with increased risk of breast cancer)
Fertility and perhaps ovulation

Question 23

What can psychological problems have?

Answer 23

Physics explanations
E.g. Peptic ulcers - possible cause of Alzheimer’s
Alzheimer’s
Autism

Question 24

Adaptations cannot be understand in absence of what?

Answer 24

Full zoological description

Question 25

What did best selling textbooks give little consideration to?

Answer 25

Providing students with access to material that might change the way evolutionary psychology focused more on the psychology bit

Question 26

What does evolutionary psychology currently discourage?

Answer 26

Ethnological approaches and the leading textbooks don’t publish them