Human evolutionary psychology: Areas of research

In human evolutionary psychology, many areas of research exist. It can be divided into three big groups.

• survival,

• mating and

• evolutionary developmental psychology.

The sorting is based on adaptive problems that arise from the extensive theory of evolution itself.

Survival

Human evolutionary psychology has many postulates. The postulate for the need of hunting during the beginnings of the human era explains the coming together of human association as a psychological mechanism. Men were the food contributor for their family and through hunting had to risk their lives for such difficult tasks. Thus all men had to come together; they hunted with other men and shared their food. These human coalitions can be seen even today

Morning sickness in women is one form of evolutionary adaptive ness that can be found even today. Women’s bodies have adapted to the dangers that the surroundings may pose to the developing foetus over the many years when they eat something. Many women experience disgust and even vomit which is one of body's ways of coping with the toxins in the environment and keeping them from reaching the baby during this significant period when the vital organs are being formed. Thus, the function of this physiological reaction was to protect the foetus.

Mating

Human evolutionary psychologists aim to look into evolved mechanisms to attract and secure mates. Mate selection, mate poaching, and mate retention are some of the few lines of research. Sexual reproduction is the means by which genes are proliferated for the further generations, and thus sexual selection plays a large role in studying the direction of human evolution.

Based on elaborate research on human evolutionary psychology, important predictions have been made about the different strategies men and women use in the mating. One of the primary things that are revealed is that women will be more selective when choosing mates, whereas men will not, particularly under short-term mating conditions. The term sexual jealousy has been described wherein females will react more aversively to emotional betrayal and males will react more aversively to sexual betrayal. The costs involved in mating for each sex are different, thus such patterns are predicted.

Women prefer a mate with a relatively higher degree of availability of resources (e.g., financial, commitment), and thus putting more herself at risk for losing those valued qualities in a mate who gives into emotional infidelity. Whereas men are restricted by the fact that they do not bear the offspring themselves and thus for a man it becomes the thing of pride because investing resources in another man's offspring does not lead to proliferation of the man's own genes.

Evolutionary developmental psychology

Due to continuous research in human evolutionary psychology, researchers have come up with a postulate that longevity improves the endurance of babies because while the parents were out hunting, the grand-parents were concerned for the infants. Thus giving an apt answer for the fundamental question raised as to why humans live so long after reproduction, since according to human evolutionary psychology, what matters most is that individuals live long enough to reproduce and pass on their genes for the next generation.

Also, evolutionary selection decrease with age. Many harmful conditions and non-adaptive distinctiveness that appear among older adults who frequently suffer the pains, aches, and infirmities of aging has not been got rid by natural selection. Consequently, as the usefulness of human evolutionary selection decrease with age, the need for culture increases.

http://www.humanpsychology.org/2010/05/human-evolutionary-psychology-areas-of.html