Center for Evolutionary Psychology (UC Santa Barbara)
Evolutionary psychology has rapidly developed into a multidisciplinary integrative research framework within which cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, cultural anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, paleoanthropologists, hunter-gatherer researchers, primatologists, developmental psychologists, social psychologists, behavioral ecologists, and others are communicating and collaborating about issues of mutual relevance.
The UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology brings together research teams with expertise in these fields to identify and progressively map (1) the recurrent adaptive problems and selection pressures our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced, (2) the cognitive modules and emotion programs that evolved to solve these problems, (3) the neural implementation of these mechanisms, (4) how these specialized mechanisms systematically pattern individual behavior and social interactions, and (5) how these mechanisms regulate transmission of cultural representations from mind to mind, generating and shaping culture.