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Evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking in psychology, arguing that just as the heart evolved to pump blood, the liver evolved to detoxify poisons, and the kidneys evolved to filter turbid fluids there is modularity of mind in that different psychological mechanisms evolved to solve different adaptive problems. [5]
A psychological adaptation seen universally in humans is to easily learn a fear of snakes. [1] A psychological adaptation is a functional, cognitive or behavioral trait that benefits an organism in its environment. Psychological adaptations fall under the scope of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs), [2] however, EPMs refer to a less ...
Mechanism. Mechanistic explanations for how an organism's structures work Evolutionary. Why a species evolved the structures (adaptations) it has Phylogeny. The history of the evolution of sequential changes in a species over many generations Adaptation. A species trait that evolved to solve a reproductive or survival problem in the ancestral ...
Domain-specific mechanisms, on the other hand, come with content that is specialized for their domain (e.g. mating, foraging, theory of mind etc.) and can therefore immediately dismiss a staggering number of plausible courses of action (which by definition a domain-general mechanism would have to examine one by one) for one or a few favoured ...
The human capacity to store and transmit culture arose from genetically evolved psychological mechanisms. This implies that at some point during the evolution of the human species a type of social learning leading to cumulative cultural evolution was evolutionarily advantageous.
The history of evolutionary psychology began with Charles Darwin, who said that humans have social instincts that evolved by natural selection.Darwin's work inspired later psychologists such as William James and Sigmund Freud but for most of the 20th century psychologists focused more on behaviorism and proximate explanations for human behavior.
Evolutionary psychiatry, also known as Darwinian psychiatry, [1] [2] is a theoretical approach to psychiatry that aims to explain psychiatric disorders in evolutionary terms. [3] [4] As a branch of the field of evolutionary medicine, it is distinct from the medical practice of psychiatry in its emphasis on providing scientific explanations rather than treatments for mental disorder.
One reason depression is thought to be a pathology is that it causes so much psychic pain and distress. However, physical pain is also very distressful, yet it has an evolved function: to inform the organism that it is being damaged, to motivate it to withdraw from the source of damage, and to learn to avoid such damage-causing circumstances in the future.