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This edited volume brings together the latest research in understanding the nature, origins, and evolution of human sociability, one of the most intriguing aspects of human psychology. Sociability—our sophisticated ability to interact with others, imagine, plan, and execute interdependent behaviours—lies at the heart of our evolutionary success, and is the most important prerequisite for the development of increasingly elaborate civilizations. With contributions from internationally renowned r...

This collection of essays examines selected works in the American literary tradition from an evolutionary perspective. Using an interdisciplinary framework to pose new questions about long admired, much discussed texts, the collection as a whole provides an introduction to Darwinian literary critical methodology. Individual essays feature a variety of figures-Benjamin Franklin to Billy Collins-targeting fitness-related issues ranging from sexual strategies and parental investment to cheating and...

Evolution and Psychology is a critical exploration of how evolutionary approaches can be used to understand the human mind and behaviour. Written for undergraduate students in the social sciences, this text provides an accessible introduction to foundational concepts in evolutionary biology. It then explores evolutionary perspectives on key psychological topics such as cognition, development, group dynamics, mate choice, language and communication, psychopathology, and culture. An interdisc...

Why is horror in film and literature so popular? Why do viewers and readers enjoy feeling fearful? Experts in the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology posit that behaviors from our ancestors that favored survival and adaptation still influence our actions, decisions and thoughts today. The author, with input from a new generation of Darwinists, explores six primal narratives that recur in the horror genre. They are territoriality, tribalism, fear of genetic assimilation, mat...

The modern world is dominated by ideas that are threatening to kill us: that life is one long battle from conception to grave; that all creatures, including human beings, are driven by their selfish DNA; that the universe is just stuff, for us to use at will. These ideas are seen as emerging from science and hard-nosed philosophy, and become self-fulfilling. They have led us to create a world in perpetual strife, that is unjust and in many ways precarious. This remarkable book by an experienced...

We feel therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are essential to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. But is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? To answer these questions we need a scientific understanding of consciousness: what it is and why it has evolved. Nicholas Humphrey has been researching these issues for fifty years. In this extraordinary book, weaving together intellectual adventur...

The term 'Implicit Learning' refers to the way in which knowledge of fairly complex, patterned material can be acquired without any conscious effort to learn it and with little to no awareness of what has been learned. Over the past fifty years, Implict Learning has became a vigorously researched area in the social sciences. In The Cognitive Unconscious, Arthur S. Reber and Rhianon Allen bring together several dozen experts from social science and neuroscience to present a broad overview of th...

After the disappointing events of the 1960s, including the loss of Algeria, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the American war in the former French colony of Indo-China, people in France began to look seriously to Freudianism in the transformed version of Jacques Lacan, for a new way of understanding human relations and the relations between human beings and society. The movement in France is not specifically psychoanalytic but developed against such a background. Psychoanalytic thought...

"Intense, rapid, brilliant. A pioneer contribution to the feminization of psychiatric thinking and practice." -Adrienne Rich, New York Times Book Review "Challenges the definition of madness itself. No serious future studies will be able to ignore its theories or its very existence." -Gloria Steinem, Ms. Magazine "A stunning book . . . absolutely fascinating . . . necessary to every woman in America." - Los Angeles Times Feminist icon Phyllis Chesler's pioneering work, Women and Madness , remain...

The Neuropsychology of Anxiety first appeared in 1982 as the first volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, and it quickly established itself as a classic work in the psychology and neuroscience literature. It presented an innovative, and at times controversial, theory of anxiety and the brain systems, especially the septo-hippocampal system, that subserve it. This completely updated and revised third edition provides a further updated theory of septo hippocampal function combined with an improv...