The evolution and development of the uniquely human capacity for emotional awareness: A synthesis of comparative anatomical, cognitive, neurocomputational, and evolutionary psychological perspectives
| Autor: | Horst D. Steklis, Richard D. Lane, Ryan Smith, Netzin Gerald Steklis, Karen L. Weihs |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Emotions
Individuality 050105 experimental psychology Life history theory 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Animals Humans Learning 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Cognitive science Computational neuroscience Socioemotional selectivity theory Working memory General Neuroscience 05 social sciences Representation (systemics) Cognition Awareness Evolutionary psychology Biological Evolution Anatomy Comparative Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Memory Short-Term Psychology Construct (philosophy) 030217 neurology & neurosurgery |
| Zdroj: | Biological psychology. 154 |
| ISSN: | 1873-6246 |
| Popis: | We present an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the expanded capacity in humans (relative to other animals) to be consciously aware of emotions (emotional awareness; EA). To do so, we provide a synthesis of many different bodies of work, including those on cognitive and computational neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and comparative anatomy. Based on active inference models within computational neuroscience, we first argue that the disproportional expansion of association cortices in humans during evolution reflects additional hierarchical levels of processing that allow learning, inference, and simulation of multimodal regularities over longer timescales – affording abstract concept learning, the ability to internally simulate the distal future outcomes of actions, and an expanded working memory capacity. This increase in general reflective capacity then allows for emotion concept learning and the ability to simulate emotions and manipulate them in working memory when deciding how to act – plausibly due to selective pressures within a hypersocial niche. We also review evidence for domain-specific adaptations affording biased attention toward socio-affective signals necessary to learn about and infer the emotions of self and others. Drawing on the construct of life history strategy within evolutionary psychology, we argue that individual differences in EA within humans can be understood as the result of tuning particular parameters to the statistics of the local environment. When early environmental/social signals are unpredictable, this reduces the use of reflective capacity when long timescale (socioemotional) regularities are considered unreliable. We conclude by discussing the implications for mental health and hypotheses that could be tested in future research. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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