Evolving Evolutionary Psychology Narvaez, Darcia; Moore, David S.; Witherington, David C. ...
The American psychologist,
04/2022, Letnik:
77, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Which evolutionary theory can best benefit psychological theory, research, and application? The most well-known school of evolutionary psychology has a narrow conceptual perspective (a.k.a., "Narrow ...Evolutionary Psychology" or NEP). Proponents of NEP have long argued that their brand of evolutionary psychology represents a full-fledged scientific revolution, with Buss (2020) recently likening NEP's scientific impact to that of a Copernican or Darwinian paradigm shift. However, NEP stands on two traditions that are now the subjects of serious debate and revision: the neo-Darwinian adaptationist framework within evolutionary biology, and the computationalist "mind-as-computer" framework within cognitive science. Although NEP calls itself revolutionary, the significant revolutions taking place today in both evolutionary biology and cognitive science reveal NEP to be rooted in the orthodoxies of the past. We propose a more inclusive, developmental evolutionary psychology theory (DEPTH) better suited for our field in multiple ways, from acknowledging epigenesis to incorporating developmental science. To discern appropriate baselines for human nature and for human becoming, one must integrate developmental neuroscience, anthropology, and cognitive archeology. To be of value in addressing and remedying the challenges facing humanity, psychological theories must recognize the central importance of our plasticity, evolved developmental niche, and deep history.
Public Significance Statement
Understanding humans and our behavior requires unpacking our evolutionary heritages and developmental pathways. We inherit much more than genes. Biology, environment, and culture are seamlessly intertwined, in both individual development and evolution. Every individual constructs their personhood through real-time engagement with the world, so it matters what kind of relational experiences the individual has. In contrast to the most prominent evolutionary psychology theory that emphasizes the stranglehold of humanity's evolutionary past, a developmental evolutionary psychology theory orients to dynamic development in the present, taking epigenetics and plasticity seriously. This approach is better able to guide research and practice, and free people from the disempowering belief in biological determinism.
Taking Emergence Seriously Witherington, David C.
Human development,
06/2011, Letnik:
54, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The dynamic systems (DS) approach has emerged as an influential and potentially unifying metatheory for developmental science. Its central platform – the argument against design – suggests that ...structure spontaneously and without prescription emerges through self-organization. In one of the most prominent accounts of DS, Thelen and her colleagues Spencer, Dineva, & Schöner, 2009a; Thelen & Smith, 1994, 2006 have extended the argument against design to a complete ontological rejection of structural explanation. I argue that this antistructuralist stance conceptually undermines the very principle of emergence through self-organization upon which the approach is built, jeopardizing its process focus. Taking emergence seriously entails a strong commitment to circular causality and the reciprocal nature of structure-function relations through the adoption of a pluralistic model of causality, one that recognizes both local-to-global processes of construction and global-to-local processes of constraint.
The psychological revolution that follows the onset of independent locomotion in the latter half of the infant's first year provides one of the best illustrations of the intimate connection between ...action and psychological processes. In this paper, we document some of the dramatic changes in perception-action coupling, spatial cognition, memory, and social and emotional development that follow the acquisition of independent locomotion. We highlight the range of converging research operations that have been used to examine the relation between locomotor experience and psychological development, and we describe recent attempts to uncover the processes that underlie this relation. Finally, we address three important questions about the relation that have received scant attention in the research literature. These questions include: (1) What changes in the brain occur when infants acquire experience with locomotion? (2) What role does locomotion play in the maintenance of psychological function? (3) What implications do motor disabilities have for psychological development? Seeking the answers to these questions can provide rich insights into the relation between action and psychological processes and the general processes that underlie human development.
Disciplines like evolutionary developmental psychology admirably focus on trying to rehabilitate narrow evolutionary psychology (NEP) from within, by adding a developmental focus to NEP's tenets of ...adaptationism and computationalism. We argue, however, that these tenets are fundamentally incompatible with taking psychology and its development seriously, and that the kinds of modifications introduced by evolutionary developmental psychologists do not go deep enough to qualitatively change the nondevelopmental outlook of NEP.
Conceptual and empirical advances across the biological and psychological sciences have made it increasingly clear that genetic and environmental factors cannot be meaningfully partitioned when ...attempting to explain development. This should be a major theme within the contemporary field of epigenetics. However, the field has yet to fully extricate itself from reductionist tendencies in its conceptualization of developmental relations. Epigenetics today still routinely promotes both a reductionist privileging of molecular over molar levels of explanation and a reductionist focus on separate and distinct roles for genes and environment in any given developmental relation. We argue that the field needs to more rigorously pursue a process-oriented framework that is integrated across molecular, organismal, and environmental levels of biological organization. Transcending the worn and outdated nature-nurture controversy will require a truly developmental epigenetics that embraces the importance of emergence, context, and hierarchical relations in all developmental explanation.
The Epigenesis of Wariness of Heights Dahl, Audun; Campos, Joseph J.; Anderson, David I. ...
Psychological science,
07/2013, Letnik:
24, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Human infants with little or no crawling experience surprisingly show no wariness of heights, but such wariness becomes exceptionally strong over the life span. Neither depth perception nor falling ...experiences explain this extraordinary developmental shift; however, something about locomotor experience does. The crucial component of locomotor experience in this emotional change is developments in visual proprioception—the optically based perception of self-movement. Precrawling infants randomly assigned to drive a powered mobility device showed significantly greater visual proprioception, and significantly greater wariness of heights, than did controls. More important, visual proprioception mediated the relation between wariness of heights and locomotor experience. In a separate study, crawling infants' visual proprioception predicted whether they would descend onto the deep side of a visual cliff, a finding that confirms the importance of visual proprioception in the development of wariness of heights.
Despite the multitude of negative outcomes associated with thin-ideal internalization for girls and women living in westernized societies, we know very little about how early in development ...thin-ideal internalization occurs or how it might manifest in very young children. This cross-sectional investigation assessed body size stereotyping and thin-ideal internalization in 55 preschool girls (ages 3–5 years) from the Southwestern U.S. using a new method of assessment that is more sensitive to the cognitive developmental stage of this age group. Results suggest that girls as young as 3 years old are already emotionally invested in the thin ideal. Discussion considers moving beyond the demonstration of fat stigmatization per se to measure how personally invested preschool children may be in beauty ideals.
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