Human Emotions: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective

Key Concepts

Evolutionary Psychology in Emotions: Evolutionary psychology provides a framework for understanding emotions as adaptive mechanisms that have developed to solve key problems faced by our ancestors.
Superordinate Mechanisms: Emotions act as superordinate mechanisms, coordinating other cognitive and physiological systems to address adaptive challenges.
Emotion Diversity: The approach broadens the spectrum of emotions to include those unique to humans, not only those shared with other species.

Traditional evolutionary approaches focus on basic emotions shared with other species and characterized by distinct signals.
The evolutionary psychological perspective expands on this by including a wider range of emotions and considering them within an information-processing framework.

Emotions evolved to tackle various adaptive problems, such as mating, survival, and social interaction.
Emotions like disgust and sexual arousal are explored as solutions to these adaptive challenges.

This perspective integrates cognitive processes, viewing emotions as mechanisms that process information to guide behavior appropriately in different contexts.

The paper presents new hypotheses regarding emotions, particularly disgust and sexual arousal, offering directions for future research.

Disgust: Explored as an adaptive system to avoid disease and contaminants, with implications for understanding phobias and hygiene behaviors.
Sexual Arousal: Investigated as a response mechanism, potentially affecting decision-making and risk assessment.

Laith Al-Shawaf: Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, USA
Daniel Conroy-Beam: Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, USA
Kelly Asao: Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, USA
David M. Buss: Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, USA