Neuroethology of reward and decision making

Ethology, the evolutionary science of behaviour, assumes that natural selection shapes behaviour and its neural substrates in humans and other animals. In this view, the nervous system of any animal comprises a suite of morphological and behavioural adaptations for solving specific information processing problems posed by the physical or social environment. Since the allocation of behaviour often reflects economic optimization of evolutionary fitness subject to physical and cognitive constraints, neurobiological studies of reward, punishment, motivation and decision making will profit from an appreciation of the information processing problems confronted by animals in their natural physical and social environments

An evolutionary perspective on health psychology: New approaches and applications

Although health psychologists' efforts to understand and promote health are most effective when guided by theory, health psychology has not taken full advantage of theoretical insights provided by evolutionary psychology. Here, we argue that evolutionary perspectives can fruitfully inform strategies for addressing some of the challenges facing health psychologists. Evolutionary psychology's emphasis on modular, functionally specialized psychological systems can inform approaches to understanding the myriad behaviors grouped under the umbrella of “health,” as can theoretical perspectives used by evolutionary anthropologists, biologists, and psychologists (e.g., Life History Theory). We detail some early investigations into evolutionary health psychology, and we provide suggestions for directions for future research

Emotions and actions associated with altruistic helping and punishment

Evolutionary altruism (defined in terms of fitness effects) exists in the context of punishment in addition to helping. We examine the proximate psychological mechanisms that motivate altruistic helping and punishment, including the effects of genetic relatedness, potential for future interactions, and individual differences in propensity to help and punish. A cheater who is a genetic relative provokes a stronger emotional reaction than a cheater who is a stranger, but the behavioral response is modulated to avoid making the transgression public in the case of cheating relatives. Numerous behavioral differences are not accompanied by emotional differences, suggesting that other psychological mechanisms dictate the specific response to emotion-provoking events. Paradoxically, there is a positive correlation between temptation to cheat and propensity to punish others for cheating, leading to a concept of ?selfish punishment? that has been substantiated by a computer simulation model. This study demonstrates that fictional scenarios can provide an important methodological tool for studying the psychological basis of helping and punishment

Culture, Embodiment and Genes: Unravelling the Triple Helix

Much recent work stresses the role of embodiment and action in thought and reason, and celebrates the power of transmitted cultural and environmental structures to transform the problem-solving activity required of individual brains. By apparent contrast, much work in evolutionary psychology has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to an ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness, with an attendant stress upon the limitations and cognitive biases that result. On the face of it, this suggests either a tension or, at least, a mismatch, with the symbiotic dyad of cultural evolution and embodied cognition. In what follows, we explore this mismatch by focusing on three key ideas: cognitive niche construction; cognitive modularity; and the existence (or otherwise) of an evolved universal human nature. An appreciation of the power and scope of the first, combined with consequently more nuanced visions of the latter two, allow us to begin to glimpse a much richer vision of the combined interactive potency of biological and cultural evolution for active, embodied agents

The grammar of anger: Mapping the computational architecture of a recalibrational emotion

According to the recalibrational theory of anger, anger is a computationally complex cognitive system that evolved to bargain for better treatment. Anger coordinates facial expressions, vocal changes, verbal arguments, the withholding of benefits, the deployment of aggression, and a suite of other cognitive and physiological variables in the service of leveraging bargaining position into better outcomes. The prototypical trigger of anger is an indication that the offender places too little weight on the angry individual's welfare when making decisions, i.e. the offender has too low a welfare tradeoff ratio (WTR) toward the angry individual. Twenty-three experiments in six cultures, including a group of foragers in the Ecuadorian Amazon, tested six predictions about the computational structure of anger derived from the recalibrational theory. Subjects judged that anger would intensify when: (i) the cost was large, (ii) the benefit the offender received from imposing the cost was small, or (iii) the offender imposed the cost despite knowing that the angered individual was the person to be harmed. Additionally, anger-based arguments conformed to a conceptual grammar of anger, such that offenders were inclined to argue that they held a high WTR toward the victim, e.g., “the cost I imposed on you was small”, “the benefit I gained was large”, or “I didn't know it was you I was harming.” These results replicated across all six tested cultures: the US, Australia, Turkey, Romania, India, and Shuar hunter-horticulturalists in Ecuador. Results contradict key predictions about anger based on equity theory and social constructivism. © 2017 Elsevier B.V

Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame

This set of experiments shows that in 15 traditional small-scale societies there is an extraordinarily close correspondence between (i) the intensity of shame felt if one exhibited specific acts or traits and (ii) the magnitude of devaluation expressed in response to those acts or traits by local audiences, and even foreign audiences. Three important and widely acknowledged sources of cultural variation between communities—}geographic proximity, linguistic similarity, and religious similarity{—}all failed to account for the strength of between-community correlations in the shame{–}devaluation link. This supplies a parallel line of evidence that shame is a universal system, part of our species{’} cooperative biology, rather than a product of cultural evolution.Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species{’} social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action{’}s direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame{’s match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution

Affective processes as network hubs

The practical problems of designing and coding a web-based flight simulator for teachers has led to a ‘three-tier plus environment’ model (COVE model) for a software agent’s cognition (C), psychologicsal (O), physical (V) processes and responses to tasks and interpersonal relationships within a learning environment (E). The purpose of this article is to introduce how some of the COVE model layers represent preconscious processing hubs in an AI human-agent’s representation of learning in a serious game, and how an application of the Five Factor Model of psychology in the O layer determines the scope of dimensions for a practical computational model of affective processes. The article illustrates the model with the classroom-learning context of the simSchool application (www.simschool.org); presents details of the COVE model of an agent’s reactions to academic tasks; discusses the theoretical foundations; and outlines the research-based real world impacts from external validation studies as well as new testable hypotheses of simSchool