Evolutionary and differential psychology: conceptual conflicts and the path to integration

Abstract

Evolutionary psychology has seen the majority of its success exploring adaptive features of the mind believed to be ubiquitous across our species. This has given rise to the belief that the adaptationist approach has little to offer the field of differential psychology, which concerns itself exclusively with the ways in which individuals systematically differ. By framing the historical origins of both disciplines, and exploring the means through which they each address the unique challenges of psychological description and explanation, the present article identifies the conceptual and theoretical problems that have kept differential psychology isolated not only from evolutionary psychology, but from explanatory approaches in general. Paying special attention to these conceptual problems, the authors review how these difficulties are being overcome by contemporary evolutionary research, and offer instructive suggestions concerning how differential researchers (and others) can best build upon these innovations.

Life History Strategy and the HEXACO Personality Dimensions

“…Theorists have recently made considerable progress integrating personality psychology with evolutionary psychology (Buss, 2009;Marsh and Boag, 2013;Michalski and Shackleford, 2010). Several theoretical approaches, not all of them mutually exclusive, show considerable potential in this regard (e.g., Lukaszewski and Roney, 2011;Nettle, 2006).…”

A teaching design of ecological class based on immersive virtual reality spatial fusion

“…Furthermore, multi-linguistic research will become the trend of the SLA with the development of diversification in the world (Wen and Wang, 2004;Zhang, 2011). Faced with the new situations, teachers' training is demanding and urgent, not only in educational technology but also in educational concepts (Marsh and Boag, 2013). The online-offline hybrid and technologyenhanced teaching and learning model breaks through the physical boundary and extends a three-layer fusion space.…”

“…Four hypotheses were put forward as theoretical bases and concepts from the perspective of SLA. They were Output-Motivated Hypothesis, Input-Motivated Hypothesis, Select Learning Hypothesis, and Assessing-Motivated Learning Hypothesis (Cumming, 2001;Marsh and Boag, 2013;Wen, 2015Wen, , 2021. SLA depended on learning objectives, learning contents, learning methods, and assessing systems motivated by a series of teaching activities and input and output tasks (Rubin, 2005;Zhu and Bai, 2019).…”

On Dreams and Motivation: Comparison of Freud’s and Hobson’s Views

“…Additionally, if the free energy model proposes that the brain both avoids ‘surprise’ and acts lawfully (so that modeling can occur) then there must be some orderly, predictable working of such a system. Furthermore, while it might be logically possible for a conjunction to occur between design error and functional outcome, given the available dream content evidence referred to above, it is more plausible to assume that distal shaping processes would make certain dream content more likely to occur than others given the evolutionary shaping of ‘important interactions,’ to use Hobson’s (2013, p. 26) terms (see Marsh and Boag, 2013). A more expedient position would be to link motivation and cognition, which provides a more compelling picture of how motivation contributes to the character of dreams.…”