Evolutionary Psychology and Emotions: A Species-Typical Computational Design

Abstract

Evolutionary psychology is a major naturalistic approach to knowledge. It begins from a fundamental observation: the human brain is the product of natural selection trying to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this paper, I describe this approach and focus on the emotions, an important aspect of mental life. Emotions, I argue, are a superordinate program that evolved to coordinate the activity of other programs in the solution of typical adaptive problems.