Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology最新文献

Objective

In a UK national census sample, women from the upper and lower socioeconomic (SES) classes achieve parity in completed family size, despite marked differences in both birth rates and offspring survival rates. We test the hypothesis that women adopt reproductive strategies that manipulate age at first reproduction to achieve this.

Methods

We use a Monte-Carlo modeling approach parameterized with current UK lifehistory data to simulate the reproductive lifehistories of 64,000 individuals from different SES classes, with parameter values at each successive time step drawn from a statistical distribution defined by the census data.

Results

We show that, if they are to achieve parity with women in the higher socioeconomic classes, women in lower socioeconomic classes must begin reproducing 5.65 years earlier on average than women in the higher SES classes in order to offset the higher class-specific mortality and infertility rates that they experience. The model predicts very closely the observed differences in age at first reproduction in the census data.

Conclusions

Opting to delay reproduction in order to purse an education-based professional career may be a high risk strategy that many lower SES women are unwilling and unable to pursue. As a result, reproducing as early as possible may be the best strategy available to them.

Objective

The emergence and growth of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) in the behavioral sciences has been characterized as a “scientific revolution” (e.g. Buss, 2020). According to Kuhn's framework, a scientific revolution in a discipline is marked by the emergence of a new, dominant school of thought, which eclipses all the other theories. The aim of this study was to assess quantitatively if EP may be regarded as a "scientific revolution" sensu Kuhn.

Method

I performed a bibliometric analysis of the prevalence of EP (broadly defined) in Psychology, and contrasted it with the prevalence of the socio-cultural approach, known as the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).

Results

My analysis reveals that the SSSM enjoys significantly greater prominence than EP and is growing at a swifter pace. My analysis also suggests that a “cultural evolutionary” approach, which integrates evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives, is still underdeveloped.

Conclusions

Despite being sympathetic to the claim that EP can potentially lead to a paradigm shift in the behavioral sciences, I argue that a prudent approach may involve recognizing the current state of affairs, envisioning realistic change, and building a more conceptually and methodologically heterogeneous research community in EP.

Occupational burnout is a globally pandemic public health concern, exerting high costs on organizations, consumers, and workers. Amid definitional debate regarding burnout, psychometric research finds substantial construct overlap with clinical depression. In turn, evolutionary models explaining the adaptive origins of depression bring vital clarity to our conceptions of burnout. Of particular relevance are explanations of depression as an ancient appeasement strategy to avert conflict with higher-ranking group members, or dangerous in-group alliances. These dynamics underlie the relationship between dominance-oriented leadership styles and supervisee burnout, and can serve as leverage points to improve psychological safety, job satisfaction, and, ultimately, workplace productivity. Such models also provide key insights into the relationship between workgroup conflict and burnout, and the mental health problems increasingly identified among remote workers—in particular, difficulties with isolation, and with the constraints of communication technologies. While largely neglected in the organizational literature, the evolutionary sciences offer a pathway to correct mismatches between the environments in which our social instincts evolved, and the modern-day workplace.

Health perceptions are thought to play an important role in human mate preferences. Although many studies have investigated potential relationships between health ratings of faces and facial symmetry, prototypicality, and sexual dimorphism, findings have been mixed across studies. Consequently, we tested for potential relationships between health ratings of faces and the symmetry, prototypicality, and sexual dimorphism of those faces’ shapes. When these three shape characteristics were considered in separate regression models, we observed significant positive relationships between health ratings and both shape symmetry and prototypicality. By contrast, health ratings and sexual dimorphism were not significantly correlated in these analyses. However, in analyses in which symmetry, prototypicality, and sexual dimorphism were entered simultaneously as predictors in a single model, prototypicality, but not symmetry, was significantly correlated with health ratings. Moreover, sexual dimorphism predicted health ratings of female, but not male, faces in these analyses. Collectively, these results suggest that the relationship between symmetry and health ratings is, at least partly, driven by the effect of prototypicality on health perceptions and highlight the importance of considering multiple aspects of face shape when investigating factors that predict perceived health.

Objectives

Body size and shape are sexually dimorphic in humans, with men being characterized with larger upper bodies, while women typically having broader pelvises. Such sexually dimorphic traits, quantified as shoulder to hip ratio (SHR) in men and waist to hip ratio (WHR) in women, serve as cues of an individual’s genetic fitness, reproductive potential, health, and resource holding power, and, thereby, functioning as attractiveness cues to the opposite sex.

Methods

In the current study, we investigated men’s and women’s preference for the opposite sex body shape (WHR in women and SHR in men) in samples from Iran, Norway, Poland, and Russia. Women rated their preference for men’s SHR (1.20 to 1.50) and men rated their preference for women’s WHR (0.55 − 0.85).

Results and Conclusion

Our results showed that Iranian and Norwegian men preferred less feminine WHRs in women compared to Polish and Russian men. Moreover, Iranian women preferred less masculine SHRs in men than women from other countries. Altogether, the current research showed that there are variations in men’s preferences for women’s WHR and women’s preferences for men’s SHR among these countries.

Objectives

Decision-making is often driven and guided by the evaluation of action effects and external cues on action outcomes, which are essential to optimize behavior in an adaptive manner. This work aimed at investigating decision-makers’ sensitivity to external cues (including positive and negative reinforcement) and their flexibility in using feedback to decide whether to stay or change the course of their choices. We also explored the neurofunctional correlates of individuals’ ability to re-assess their decisions in response to feedback, and its possible association with general decision-making styles.

Methods

A realistic decision-making task set in a professional context was devised and administered in addition to the General Decision Making Style (GDMS) inventory. During the task, neurofunctional correlates of affective regulation, cognitive engagement, and information-processing load were non-invasively measured via wearable EEG.

Results

Participants showed a tendency to maintain their decisions following positive reinforcement, or when no explicit feedback was provided. Surprisingly, some of them tended to stay with their decisions also following negative feedback. We observed lower cognitive effort, as marked by lower prefrontal beta power, following positive feedback. Finally, we reported negative correlations between GDMS Dependent style scores and task scores in the positive feedback and no-feedback conditions, along with a positive correlation between GDMS Spontaneous style scores and task scores in the no-feedback condition.

Conclusions

Our findings have implications for understanding adaptive and maladaptive decision-making in contexts in which feedback serves as a compass to orient one’s own performance and prevent the so-called cognitive inertia.

Objective

Decades of research suggest a small, but significant positive association between testosterone (T) and measures of aggression and mating psychology/behavior. More recently, researchers have developed single-dose pharmacological challenge paradigms to test the causal role of T in modulating such processes.

Methods

We summarize and synthesize research from single-dose T administration studies. We first summarize the literature showing effects of T on neural and physiological functioning. Next, we investigate T’s effects on aggressive behavior and mating psychology in humans.

Results

Evidence indicates that a single dose of T can have relatively rapid effects on aggression and mating psychology/behavior. However, such effects are often complex and moderated by personality, genetics, and social-contextual factors.

Conclusion

Popular media discourse suggests that T is straightforwardly intertwined with aggression and sexual behavior. Our review indicates that there is a kernel of truth to T’s links to these complex phenotypic outcomes. However, more work will be necessary to establish the role that psychological, genetic, and social-contextual factors play in moderating associations of T with aggression and sexual behavior.

Objectives

We argue that research in the psychological sciences testing evolutionarily informed questions could benefit considerably from more frequent use of techniques common in behavior genetics.

Methods

We review some of the reasons why data and analytical strategies in behavior genetics confer certain advantages over more traditional forms of data analysis. In particular, we focus on the wide availability of secondary data, the generalizability of data, the capacity of certain designs to bolster causal inference capabilities, and the overall adaptability of the research designs to a wide array of empirical questions.

Results

Not only do we show how the use of sibling designs can be of methodological assistance, but we also demonstrate how they can play a role in refining theories informed by evolution. In order to give a more concrete vision of what this can look like, we offer a type of case study using prior work which has already taken advantage of behavior genetic tools.

Conclusions

Because of the efforts to situate psychological science in the context of evolutionary biology, the field has undergone considerable intellectual growth. We suggest that by simply making more frequent use of tools in behavior genetics, the fields of psychology might further accelerate the progress that is already well underway.

Purpose

Adrenal androgens like dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) are important to numerous aspects of health and psychosocial stress physiology. DHEA is responsive to stress, and previous studies have shown chronic stress can be associated with a reduction in DHEA. However, the large majority of this work has been conducted in resource-rich, industrialized societies, with few studies examining how adrenal androgens respond to stressors in environments with persistent resource related concerns. Here we examine the relationships between androgens and chronic psychosocial stress in a sample of Himba pastoralists, in order to determine the relationship between DHEA and stress in a resource-limited environment.

Methods

We assayed DHEA and testosterone in 122 afternoon saliva samples from 46 Himba women aged 18–66, median age 30. Women also completed a chronic psychosocial stress survey, which included social, health, and resource related stressors reported over the past thirty days.

Results

DHEA concentrations show a curvilinear relationship with age, peaking in the mid-30s; testosterone was relatively flat across the life course. DHEA, but not testosterone, was negatively associated with chronic stress scores. In a comparison of question types, resource-related stressors showed the strongest relationship with DHEA.

Conclusion

Our results support findings from previous studies conducted in industrialized societies, showing that chronic stress is associated with a reduction in DHEA concentrations. In contrast, salivary testosterone appears unrelated to chronic stress. Given the associations between DHEA and other aspects of health, better understanding of drivers of DHEA variability can elucidate linkages between stressors and health outcomes.