This article opens by noting that positive emotions do not fit existing models of emotions. Consequently, a new model is advanced to describe the form and function of a subset of positive emotions, including joy, interest, contentment, and love. This new model posits that these positive emotions serve to broaden an individual's momentary thought-action repertoire, which in turn has the effect of building that individual's physical, intellectual, and social resources. Empirical evidence to support this broaden-and-build model of positive emotions is reviewed, and implications for emotion regulation and health promotion are discussed. Even though research on emotions has this new perspective are featured. My hope is flourished in recent years, investigations that that this article will unlock scientific curiosity expressly target positive emotions remain few about positive emotions, not only to test the and far between. Any review of the psychologi- ideas presented here, but also to build other new cal literature on emotions will show that models that might illuminate the nature and psychologists have typically favored negative value of positive emotions. Psychology sorely emotions in theory building and hypothesis needs more studies on positive emotions, not testing. In so doing, psychologists have inadver- simply to level the uneven knowledge bases tently marginalized the emotions, such as joy, between negative and positive emotions, but interest, contentment, and love, that share a more critically, to guide applications and pleasant subjective feel. To date, then, psycholo- interventions that might improve individual and gy's knowledge base regarding positive emo- collective functioning, psychological welltions is so thin that satisfying answers to the question "What good are positive emotions?" have yet to be articulated. This is unfortunate. being, and physical health. Experiences of positive emotion are central to Why Have Positive Emotions human nature and contribute richly to the quality of people's lives (Diener & Larsen, Been Marginalized? 1993; Myers & Diener, 1995). But how? In At this point, it might be useful to inspect

Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to unify the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences theoretically and empirically within a single, mutually consistent, seamless scientific framework. The core of this enterprise is the integration of principles and findings drawn from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology, economics, and neuroscience with psychology in order to produce highresolution maps of human nature. By “human nature, ” evolutionary psychologists mean the evolved, reliably developing, species-typical computational architecture of the human mind, together with the physical structures and processes (in the brain, in development, and in genetics) that give rise to this informationprocessing architecture. For evolutionary psychologists, all forms of knowledge about brains and behavior are relevant, but the pivotal step is using these facts to form accurate models of the information-processing structure of psychological mechanisms.

Evolutionary psychology provides a cogent metatheory for psychological science. It has furnished compelling theories of major domains of human functioning, including mating, parenting, kinship, morality, cooperation, conflict, aggression, and aesthetics. It has produced hundreds of empirical discoveries missed entirely by prior psychologists. Developmental dynamics, properly conceived, can add to the theoretical foundation of evolutionary psychology. But it has not provided alternative theories capable of explaining the many detailed empirical discoveries made by evolutionary psychologists. Nor has it generated a comparable bounty of new empirical discoveries. By critical scientific standards— theoretical cogency, predictive accuracy, interdisciplinary consistency, and empirical harvest—modern evolutionary psychology fares well compared with alternatives. Charles Darwin is properly considered to be the first evolutionary psychologist. He offered these prophetic words at the end of his classic book, On the Origins of Species: “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation ” (Darwin,

Adherence to ingroup ideology increases after exposure to death-related stimuli, a reaction that proponents of terror management theory (TMT) explain as a psychological defense against the uniquely human existential fear of death. We argue that existential concerns are not the relevant issue; rather, such concepts can be subsumed under a larger category of adaptive challenges that prime coalitional thinking. We suggest that increases in adherence to ingroup ideology in response to adaptive challenges are manifestations of normative mental representations emanating from psychological systems designed to enhance coordination and membership in social groups. In providing an alternative to TMT, we (1) explain why the theory is inconsistent with contemporary evolutionary biology, (2) demonstrate that mortality-salience does not have the unique evocative powers ascribed to it by TMT advocates, and (3) discuss our approach to coalitional psychology, a framework consistent with modern evolutionary theory and informed by a broad understanding of cultural variation, can be employed to help account for both the corpus of results in TMT research and the growing body of findings inconsistent with TMT’s predictions.

People’s wanting and liking reactions reflect not only high-level beliefs, but also the operation of rudimentary biopsychological processes. Previous studies suggest that the following wanting and liking processes may be relevant to political behavior: irrational wanting (where wanting is triggered by activation of the brain dopamine system and becomes dissociated from liking); unconscious liking and wanting (where evaluative judgments and behavior are modified without awareness of the eliciting affective stimuli or of the underlying affective response); and fluency-based liking (where preferences are influenced by the ease of stimulus processing). This review suggests how conceptual and methodological tools from affective neuroscience and psychophysiology can refine our understanding of basic affective and motivational processes that shape political attitudes and choices. KEY WORDS: affect, choice, emotion, preference, neuroscience Citizens participate in the political process not only with their heads, but also their hearts. They are either enthusiastic about candidates or disgusted by them, engaged in or indifferent to elected officials ’ decisions, trusting or afraid of the government, passionate about social justice or hateful toward certain groups, hopeful or scared about the future, “mad as hell ” or confident about the economy. Social scientists who appreciate these observations have long been interested in understanding the functions of emotion and motivation in political behavior

ABSTRACT Personality psychology is the broadest of all psychological subdisciplines in that it seeks a conceptually integrated understanding of both human nature and important individual differences. Cultural differences pose a unique set of problems for any comprehensive theory of personality—how can they be reconciled with universals of human nature on the one hand and within-cultural variation on the other? Evolutionary psychology provides one set of conceptual tools by which this conceptual integration can be made. It requires jettisoning the false but still-pervasive dichotomy of culture versus biology, acknowledging a universal human nature, and recognizing that the human mind contains many complex psychological mechanisms that are selectively activated, depending on cultural contexts. Culture rests on a foundation of evolved psychological mechanisms and cannot be understood without those mechanisms. “The tabula of human nature was never rasa and is now being read” — W. D. Hamilton, 1997 Although cultural theorists define culture in somewhat different ways, many definitions share some core features. Culture is often used to refer to ideas, beliefs, representations, behavior patterns, practices, artifacts, and so forth that are transmitted socially across generations within a

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and the Emotions Evolutionary psychology is an approach to the psychological sciences in which principles and results drawn from evolutionary biology, cogni-tive science, anthropology, and neuroscience are integrated with the rest of psychology in or-der to map human nature. By "human nature," evolutionary psychologists mean the evolved, reliably developing, species-typical computa-tional and neural architecture of the human mind and brain. According to this view, the functional components of this architecture were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ances-tors, and to regulate behavior so that these adaptive problems were successfUlly addressed (for discussion, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psy-chology is not a specific subfield of psycholo-gy, such as the study of vision, reasoning, or so-cial behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it-including the emotions. The analysis of adaptive problems that arose ancestrally has led evolutionary psychologists to apply the concepts and methods of the cogni-tive sciences to scores of topics that are relevant to the study of emotion, such as the cognitive processes that govern cooperation, sexual at-traction, jealousy, aggression, parental love, friendship, romantic love, the aesthetics of landscape preferences, coalitional aggression,

www.elsevier.com/locate/obhdp Angry men and disgusted women: An evolutionary approach

Reputation systems promote cooperation and deter antisocial behavior in groups. Little is known, however, about how and why people share reputational information. Here we seek to establish the existence and dynamics of prosocial gossip, the sharing of negative evaluative information about a target in a way that protects others from antisocial or exploitative behavior. We present a model of prosocial gossip and the results of four studies testing the model‟s claims. Results of studies 1-3 demonstrate that (a) individuals who observe an antisocial act experience negative affect and are compelled to share information about the antisocial actor with a potentially vulnerable person, (b) sharing such information reduces negative affect created by observing the antisocial behavior (c) individuals possessing more prosocial orientations are the most motivated to engage in such gossip, even at a personal cost, and exhibit the greatest reduction in negative affect as a result. Study 4 demonstrates that prosocial gossip can effectively deter selfishness and promote cooperation. Taken together these results highlight the roles of prosocial motivations and negative affective reactions to injustice in maintaining reputational information sharing in groups. We conclude by discussing implications for reputational theories of the maintenance of cooperation in human groups.