Evolution and Psychology: Understanding Adaptations and Human Behavior, Quizzes of Personality Psychology

Download Evolution and Psychology: Understanding Adaptations and Human Behavior and more Quizzes Personality Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! TERM 1 Natural Selection DEFINITION 1 Process by which adaptations are created and change takes place over time.Darwin TERM 2 Variants DEFINITION 2 Changes, that better enabled an organism to survive and reproduce. Results in gradual changes in a species over time, as successful variants increase in frequency and eventually spread throughout the gene pool. TERM 3 Survival Selection DEFINITION 3 Natural selection, led Darwin to Focus on the events that impede survival TERM 4 Hostile forces of nature DEFINITION 4 food shortages, disease,s parasites, predators and extremes of weather. Whatever variants helped organisms survive these hostile forces of nature would lead to an increased likelihood of successful reproduction. TERM 5 Adaptations DEFINITION 5 inherited solutions to the survival and reproductive problems posed by the hostile forces of nature. TERM 6 Theory of Sexual Selection DEFINITION 6 Certain adaptations evolved because the contributed to an individual's mating success, providing an advantage in the competition for desirable mates. The evolution of characteristics because of their mating benefits rather than because of thei survival benefits. TERM 7 Intrasexual Competition DEFINITION 7 Members of the same sex compete with each other and the outcome of their contest gives the winner greater sexual access to members of the opposite sex. Leads to greater strength, intelligence or attractiveness TERM 8 Intersexual Selection DEFINITION 8 Members of one sex choose a mate based on their preferences for particular qualities in a mate. These characteristics evolve because animals that possess them are chosen more often as mates and their genes thrive. TERM 9 Genes DEFINITION 9 Packets of DNA that are inherited by children from their parents in distinct chunks TERM 10 Differential gene reproduction DEFINITION 10 defined by reproductive succes relative to others. The genes of organisms that reproduce more than others get passed down to future generations at a greater frequency than do the genes of those that reproduce less. Successful survival and successful matecompetition therefore, are both paths to differential gene reproduction. TERM 21 Deductive Reasoning Approach DEFINITION 21 "top down", theory-driven method of empirical research is one approach to scientific investigation. TERM 22 Inductive reasoning approach DEFINITION 22 "Bottom up" data driven method of empirical research. TERM 23 Three Key Levels of Personality Analysis DEFINITION 23 Human naturesex differencesindividual differences TERM 24 Human Nature DEFINITION 24 Primary product of the evolutionary process. Psychological mechanisms that are successful in helping humans survive and reproduce tend to out replicate those that are less successful. TERM 25 Need to belong DEFINITION 25 Most basic human motivators are status and acceptance by the group. Being ostracized from a group would have been extremely damaging. Therefore, it can be predicted that humans have evolved psychological mechanisms to prevent being excludedGroups serve several purposes. Can share food, information, offer protection, mates, kin. TERM 26 Social Anxiety DEFINITION 26 distress or worry about being negatively evaluated in interpersonal situations. They propose that social anxiety is a species-typical adaptation that prevents social exclusion. TERM 27 Self Esteem related to groups DEFINITION 27 Those who spend a lot of time with others enjoy higher self- esteem. Day to day fluctuations in self esteem are linked with quality and quantity of social interactions. These finding point to the notion that self esteem functions, at least in part, as an internal tracking device that monitors social inclusion. TERM 28 Helping and Altruism DEFINITION 28 Direct function of the recipients' ability to enhance the inclusive fitness of the helpers. You should be more likely to help your siblings than your nieces and nephews.People should help younger relatives more than older relatives.The tendency to help younger people depended on a critical survival context- famine conditions. TERM 29 Universal Emotions DEFINITION 29 one view: examine whether facial expressions of emotion are interpreted in the same ways across cultures. A second way is that emotions are adaptive psychological mechanisms that signal various "fitness affordances" in the social environment. a third: "manipulation hypothesis", designed to exploit the psychological mechanisms of other people.-research has confirmed recognition of happiness, disgust, anger, fear, surprise, sadness and contempt. TERM 30 Sex differences DEFINITION 30 Women have faced the problem of child birth. Men and women have also faced different information processing problems. Unvertainty of paternity. Securing a reliable or replenishable supply of resources to carry them through pregnancy and lactation. TERM 31 Evolutionary predicted sex differences DEFINITION 31 hold that the sexes will differ in precisely those domains where women and men have faced different sorts of adaptive problems. TERM 32 Sex differences in aggression DEFINITION 32 Men are overwhelmingly more often the killers, and most of their victims are other men. Men who are poor and unmarried are more likely to kill, compared with their more affluent and married counterparts. Males are more often the perpetrators of violence because they are the products of a long history of effective polygyny. TERM 33 Effective Polygyny DEFINITION 33 A few males will sire many offspring, whereas some will have none at all. The greater the ariance in reproduction, the more ferocious the competition within the sex that shows higher variance. TERM 34 Sexually dimorphic DEFINITION 34 highly different in size and structure TERM 35 Sex differences in jealousy DEFINITION 35 are productivelydamaging act, for men, would have been if his mate had had a pregnancy through sexual intercourse with another man.Thatis the act that would have jeopardized his certainty of passing on his genes.For women, infidelity could be extremely risky to the woman's reproductive success; she could risk losing her mate's resources.Men have been predicted to become more jealous than women in response to cues to a sexual infidelity. Women have been predicted to become more jealous than men in response to cues to the long term diversion of a mate's commitment. TERM 46 Life history Strategy DEFINITION 46 individuals have evolved differences in the effort they allocate to reproductively relevant problems, such as survival, mating and parenting. The core idea is that there are trade offs among these problems. TERM 47 K strategy DEFINITION 47 greater effort is allocated to survival and heavy parenting over effort allocated to obtaining many mates TERM 48 high k individuals DEFINITION 48 hypothesized to have formed strong attachments to their biological parents, avoid risk taking that would imperil survival, pursue long term mating and invest heavily in children TERM 49 low k individuals DEFINITION 49 hypothesized to have formed weaker attachments to their biological parents, have a risk taking personality, pursue short term mating and invest little in their children TERM 50 Big five within the evolutionary framework DEFINITION 50 -stable individualdifferenceson the fivefactormodel as individual differences in "motivational reactions" or solutions to particular classes of adaptive problems.-conceptualize major factors of personality as clusters of the most important features of the "adaptive landscape" of other people.-discovered that the big five were indeed closely linked with solutions to these critical adaptive problems. TERM 51 balancing selection DEFINITION 51 occurs when genetic variation is maintained by selection because different levels on a trait dimension are adaptive in different environments TERM 52 limitations of evolutionary psychology DEFINITION 52 1) adaptations are forged over the long expanse of thousands or millions of generations and we cannot go back in time and determine with absolute certainty what the precise selective forces on humans have been.2) evolutionary scientists have just scratched the surface of understanding thenature, details and design features of evolved psychological mechanisms.3) modern conditions are undoubtedly different from ancestral conditions in may respects, so that what was adaptive in the past might not be adaptive in the present.4) it is sometimes easy to come up with different and competing evolutionary hypotheses for the same phenomenon5) evolutionary hypotheses have sometimes been accused of being untestable and hence, falsifiable.