Evolutionary Personality Psychology

By Aurelio Jose Figueredo, Jon A. Sefcek, G. Vásquez, Barbara H. Brumbach, J. King, W. Jake Jacobs. Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, 2015

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Multiple selective pressures maintain and increase heritable behavioral variability among individuals across both developmental and evolutionary time: (1) directional social selection favors convergent traits, promoting mutually beneficial cooperative interactions; (2) disruptive social selection favors divergent traits, providing release from within-species competition; (3) genetic diversification responds adaptively to the stochastic (random) characteristics of environmental hazards such as uncontrollable morbidity (disease) and mortality (death); (4) developmental plasticity epigenetically directs development adaptively along different alternative pathways, modifying permanent and stable behavioral dispositions to suit long-term contingencies of survival and reproduction; and (5) behavioral flexibility deploys rapid and reversible short-term adaptive behavioral responses to transient situations.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

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