Trade-offs, individual differences, and misunderstandings about evolutionary psychology.

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (9) ◽  
pp. 930-932 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carin Perilloux ◽  
David M. G. Lewis ◽  
Cari D. Goetz ◽  
Diana S. Fleischman ◽  
Judith A. Easton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Trade Offs

Interest as the Missing Motivator in Self-Regulation

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 175-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Sansone ◽  
Dustin B. Thoman
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Close Relationships ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Goal Pursuit ◽  
Drop Out ◽  
Goal Striving ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
And Performance

Abstract. Typically, models of self-regulation include motivation in terms of goals. Motivation is proposed to fluctuate according to how much individuals value goals and expect to attain them. Missing from these models is the motivation that arises from the process of goal-pursuit. We suggest that an important aspect of self-regulation is monitoring and regulating our motivation, not just our progress toward goals. Although we can regulate motivation by enhancing the value or expectancy of attaining the outcome, we suggest that regulating the interest experience can be just as, if not more, powerful. We first present our model, which integrates self-regulation of interest within the goal-striving process. We then briefly review existing evidence, distinguishing between two broad classes of potential interest-enhancing strategies: intrapersonal and interpersonal. For each class of strategies we note what is known about developmental and individual differences in whether and how these kinds of strategies are used. We also discuss implications, including the potential trade-offs between regulating interest and performance, and how recognizing the role of the interest experience may shed new light on earlier research in domains such as close relationships, psychiatric disorders, and females' choice to drop out of math and science.

Is Compassion Innate? A Psychological Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Agnes M.F. Wong
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Psychological Health ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Reward Systems ◽  
Support Provision ◽  
Two Systems ◽  
Support Seeking

In this chapter, the author looks at compassion from two psychological perspectives: evolutionary and developmental. Evolutionary psychology proposes that there are three emotion systems: threat/self-protect, drive/reward, and affiliative/soothing. By developing our capacity to mindfully access, accept, and direct affiliative motives and emotions—for others and ourselves—we can cultivate compassion skills to shift our mind toward the affiliative/soothing system and down-regulate the threat/self-protect and drive/reward systems. Developmental psychology further contributes to our understanding of compassion by proposing two behavioural systems: the attachment behavioural system that governs support-seeking and the caregiving behavioural system that governs support provision. It suggests that the interplay between these two systems may account for individual differences in the disposition to compassion. Last, the author shows that compassion not only benefits the recipients, but also improves the psychological health of the caregivers.

Individual Differences in Vigor and Deliberation: Development of Two New Measures from an Evolutionary Psychology Theory of Human Motivation

2008 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-270
Author(s):  
Larry C. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Psychometric Properties ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Total N ◽  
Human Motivation ◽  
Psychology Theory

Three studies (total N = 403 participants; M age = 31.1 yr.; SD=13.8) are reported on the development, psychometric properties, and convergent and discriminant validities of two individual differences dimensions of Vigor (constructive arousal and energy that drives the general intensity of behavior) and Deliberation (prudence in the delay of immediate action and consideration of competing motives, emotions, and consequences of action that promote convergence of behavior toward socially desirable outcomes). These dimensions are part of Bernard, Mills, Swenson, and Walsh's evolutionary psychology theory of human motivation. Analysis suggests Vigor and Deliberation scales have reasonably good psychometric properties and may aid research on motivation from an evolutionary perspective.

scholarly journals An ontogenetic perspective on individual differences

2015 ◽  
Vol 282 (1814) ◽  
pp. 20151050 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan R. Senner ◽  
Jesse R. Conklin ◽  
Theunis Piersma
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Functional Trait ◽  
Life History Variation ◽  
Phenotypic Differences ◽  
Developmental Context ◽  
Critical Gap ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Fitness Consequences ◽  
Timing Of Onset

Phenotypic differences among individuals can arise during any stage of life. Although several distinct processes underlying individual differences have been defined and studied (e.g. parental effects, senescence), we lack an explicit, unified perspective for understanding how these processes contribute separately and synergistically to observed variation in functional traits. We propose a conceptual framework based on a developmental view of life-history variation, linking each ontogenetic stage with the types of individual differences originating during that period. In our view, the salient differences among these types are encapsulated by three key criteria: timing of onset, when fitness consequences are realized, and potential for reversibility. To fill a critical gap in this framework, we formulate a new term to refer to individual differences generated during adulthood—reversible state effects. We define these as ‘reversible changes in a functional trait resulting from life-history trade-offs during adulthood that affect fitness’, highlighting how the adult phenotype can be repeatedly altered in response to environmental variation. Defining individual differences in terms of trade-offs allows explicit predictions regarding when and where fitness consequences should be expected. Moreover, viewing individual differences in a developmental context highlights how different processes can work in concert to shape phenotype and fitness, and lays a foundation for research linking individual differences to ecological and evolutionary theory.

Trade-offs and individual differences in evolved traits.

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (9) ◽  
pp. 928-929
Author(s):  
Benjamin Winegard ◽  
Drew H. Bailey ◽  
Jonathan Oxford ◽  
David C. Geary
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Trade Offs

scholarly journals Social Responses to Media Technologies in the 21st Century: The Media are Social Actors Paradigm

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 29-55
Author(s):  
Matthew Lombard ◽  
Kun Xu
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Social Responses ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The Media

Clifford Nass and his colleagues proposed the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm in the 1990s and demonstrated that we treat computers in some of the ways we treat humans. To account for technological advances and to refine explanations for CASA results, this paper proposes the Media Are Social Actors (MASA) paradigm. We begin by distinguishing the roles of primary and secondary cues in evoking medium-as-social-actor presence and social responses. We then discuss the roles of individual differences and contextual factors in these responses and identify mindless and mindful anthropomorphism as two major complementary mechanisms for understanding MASA phenomena. Based on evolutionary psychology explanations for socialness, we conclude with nine formal propositions and suggestions for future research to test and apply MASA.

scholarly journals Are some individuals generally more behaviorally plastic than others? An experiment with sailfin mollies

PeerJ ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e5454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Gibelli ◽  
Nadia Aubin-Horth ◽  
Frédérique Dubois
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Behavioral Plasticity ◽  
Behavioral Responses ◽  
Learning Task ◽  
Behavioral Traits ◽  
Physiological Constraints ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Proximate Factors ◽  
Evolutionary Consequences ◽  
Sailfin Mollies

Individuals within the same population generally differ among each other not only in their behavioral traits but also in their level of behavioral plasticity (i.e., in their propensity to modify their behavior in response to changing conditions). If the proximate factors underlying individual differences in behavioral plasticity were the same for any measure of plasticity, as commonly assumed, one would expect plasticity to be repeatable across behaviors and contexts. However, this assumption remains largely untested. Here, we conducted an experiment with sailfin mollies (Poecilia latipinna) whose behavioral plasticity was estimated both as the change in their personality traits or mating behavior across a social gradient and using their performance on a reversal-learning task. We found that the correlations between pairwise measures of plasticity were weak and non-significant, thus indicating that the most plastic individuals were not the same in all the tests. This finding might arise because either individuals adjust the magnitude of their behavioral responses depending on the benefits of plasticity, and/or individuals expressing high behavioral plasticity in one context are limited by neural and/or physiological constraints in the amount of plasticity they can express in other contexts. Because the repeatability of behavioral plasticity may have important evolutionary consequences, additional studies are needed to assess the importance of trade-offs between conflicting selection pressures on the maintenance of intra-individual variation in behavioral plasticity.

scholarly journals Individual differences in behaviour explain variation in survival: a meta-analysis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Moiron ◽  
Kate L. Laskowski ◽  
Petri Toivo Niemelä
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Animal Personality ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Behavioural Types ◽  
Risky Behaviours ◽  
First Time

Research focusing on among-individual differences in behaviour (“animal personality”) has been blooming for over a decade. One of the central theories explaining the maintenance of behavioural variation posits a trade-off between behaviour and survival with individuals expressing greater “risky” behaviours suffering higher mortality. Here, for the first time, we synthesize the existing empirical evidence for this key prediction. Our results did not support this prediction as there was no directional relationship between riskier behaviour and greater mortality; however there was a significant absolute relationship between behaviour and survival. In total, behaviour explained a significant, but small, portion (4.4%) of the variance in survival. We also found that risky (versus “shy”) behavioural types live longer in the wild, but not in the laboratory. This suggests that individuals expressing risky behaviours might be of overall higher quality but the lack of predation pressure and resource restrictions mask this effect in laboratory environments. Our work implies that individual differences in behaviour explain important differences in survival but not in the direction predicted by theory. Importantly, this suggests that the models predicting survival trade-offs may need revision and/or empiricists may need to reconsider their proxies of risky behaviours when testing such theory.

scholarly journals Neural and behavioral correlates of episodic memory are associated with temporal discounting in older adults

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina M. Lempert ◽  
Dawn J. Mechanic-Hamilton ◽  
Long Xie ◽  
Laura E.M. Wisse ◽  
Robin de Flores ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Cortical Thickness ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Structural Integrity ◽  
Temporal Discounting ◽  
Risk Tolerance ◽  
Trade Offs

AbstractWhen facing decisions involving trade-offs between smaller, sooner and larger, delayed rewards, people tend to discount the value of future rewards. There are substantial individual differences in this tendency toward temporal discounting, however. One neurocognitive system that may underlie these individual differences is episodic memory, given the overlap in the neural circuitry involved in imagining the future and remembering the past. Here we tested this hypothesis in older adults, including both those that were cognitively normal and those with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We found that performance on neuropsychological measures of episodic memory retrieval was associated with temporal discounting, such that people with better memory discounted delayed rewards less. This relationship was specific to episodic memory and temporal discounting, since executive function (another cognitive ability) was unrelated to temporal discounting, and episodic memory was unrelated to risk tolerance (another decision-making preference). We also examined cortical thickness and volume in medial temporal lobe regions critical for episodic memory. Entorhinal cortical thickness was associated with reduced temporal discounting, with episodic memory performance partially mediating this association. The inclusion of MCI participants was critical to revealing these associations between episodic memory and entorhinal cortical thickness and temporal discounting. These effects were larger in the MCI group, reduced after controlling for MCI status, and statistically significant only when including MCI participants in analyses. Overall, these findings suggest that individual differences in temporal discounting are driven by episodic memory function, and that a decline in medial temporal lobe structural integrity may impact temporal discounting.

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