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

Human cognition is often biased, from judgments of the time of impact of approaching objects all the way through to estimations of social outcomes in the future. We propose these effects and a host of others may all be understood from an evolutionary psychological perspective. In this article, we elaborate error management theory (EMT; Haselton & Buss, 2000). EMT predicts that if judgments are made under uncertainty, and the costs of false positive and false negative errors have been asymmetric over evolutionary history, selection should have favored a bias toward making the least costly error. This perspective integrates a diverse array of effects under a single explanatory umbrella, and it yields new content-specific predictions. Better safe than sorry. (folk wisdom) Nothing ventured, nothing gained. (contradictory folk wisdom) These two wisdoms seem contradictory. The first urges caution, whereas the second reminds us that we have nothing to lose and should throw caution to the

A reconceptualization of stigma is presented that changes the emphasis from the devaluation of an individual's identity to the process by which individuals who satisfy certain criteria come to be excluded from various kinds of social interactions. The authors propose that phenomena currently placed under the general rubric of stigma involve a set of distinct psychological systems designed by natural selection to solve specific problems associated with sociality. In particular, the authors suggest that human beings possess cognitive adaptations designed to cause them to avoid poor social exchange partners, join cooperative groups (for purposes of between-group competition and exploitation), and avoid contact with those who are differentially likely to carry communicable pathogens. The evolutionary view contributes to the current conceptualization of stigma by providing an account of the ultimate function of Stigmatization and helping to explain its consensual nature.

Prostitution is low-skill, labor intensive, female, and well paid. This paper proposes a marriage market explanation to this puzzle. If a prostitute compromises her marriage market prospects, she will have to be compensated for forgone marriage market opportunities. We discuss the link between poverty and prostitution and show that prostitution may decrease with male income if wives and prostitutes are drawn from the same pool of women. We point to the role of male sex ratios, and males in transit, in sustaining high levels of prostitution, and we discuss possible reasons for its low reputation and implications for marriage patterns. I wander thro ’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

This article develops the hypothesis that intervention strategies that cultivate positive emotions are particularly suited for preventing and treating problems rooted in negative emotions, such as anxiety, depression, aggression, and stressrelated health problems. Fredrickson's (1998) broaden–and–build model of positive emotions provides the foundation for this application. According to this model, the form and function of positive and negative emotions are distinct and complementary. Negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, and sadness) narrow an individual's momentary thought–action repertoire toward specific actions that served the ancestral function of promoting survival. By contrast, positive emotions (e.g., joy, interest, and contentment) broaden an individual's momentary thought–action repertoire, which in turn can build that individual's enduring personal resources, resources that also served the ancestral function of promoting survival. One implication of the broaden–and–build model is that positive emotions have an undoing effect on negative emotions. By broadening

. How do we humans go about choosing a mate? Do we shop for them, checking prices and values and selecting the best? Do we apply for them, wooing several and taking the best that accepts us in return? Or do we screen them, testing one after another in succession until the right one comes along? Economists and other behavioral scientists have analyzed these mate-choice approaches to find their optimal algorithmic solutions; but what people really do is often quite different from these optima. In this paper, we analyze the third approach of mate choice as applicant screening and show through simulation analyses that a traditional optimal solution to this problem--the 37% rule--can be beaten along several dimensions by a class of simple "satisficing" algorithms we call the Take the Next Best mate choice rules. Thus, human mate search behavior should not necessarily be compared to the lofty optimal ideal, but instead may be more usefully studied through the development and analysis of poss...

Cultural psychology, and other social sciences (e.g. cultural anthropology, sociology), seek to document cultural variation, yet have difficulty providing strong empirical tests of explanations for that variation. It is argued here that an effective means of testing hypotheses regarding the origin of, and persistence and change in, cultural variation is by simulating cultural transmission in the lab using certain methods from experimental social psychology. Three experimental methods are reviewed: the transmission chain method, the replacement method, and the constant-group method. Although very few studies have explicitly simulated specific cross-cultural patterns, much potential exists for future investigations. This integration of small-scale experimental simulations and largescale observational or historical data is facilitated by an evolutionary framework for the study of culture, and has a precedent in the biological sciences, where experiments are used to simulate and explain the processes of biological evolution.

General intelligence (g) poses a problem for evolutionary psychology’s modular view of the human brain. The author advances a new evolutionary psychological theory of the evolution of general intelligence and argues that general intelligence evolved as a domain-specific adaptation for the originally limited sphere of evolutionary novelty in the ancestral environment. It has accidentally become universally important merely because we now live in an evolutionarily novel world. The available data seem to support the author’s contention that intelligent people can solve problems better than less intelligent people only if the problems are evolutionarily novel, and they have no advantage in solving evolutionarily familiar problems. This perspective can also solve some empirical anomalies, such as the “central theoretical problem of human sociobiology ” (D. R. Vining, 1986, p. 167) and the geographic distribution of general intelligence throughout the world. The g factor is actually a biologically based variable, which, like other biological functions in the human species, is necessarily a product of the evolutionary process. (Jensen, 1998, p. xii) The existence of the g factor (the “general intelligence ” factor) in psychometrics appears to contradict the strong modularity view of the mind. (Miller, 2000, p. 42)

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,

ABSTRACT—Male preferences for female body weight follow a consistent cross-cultural pattern such that in cultures with scarce resources, heavier women are preferred, whereas in cultures with abundant resources, thinner women are preferred. We offer a social-cognitive account for these findings based on the individual experience of resource scarcity. In four studies (N 5 1,176), we explored the possibility that this cross-cultural relationship emerges at the individual level; that is, we investigated whether situational feelings of resource scarcity predict personal preferences within a single culture. We operationalized intraindividual resource scarcity through feelings of financial and caloric dissatisfaction. Accordingly, we hypothesized—and found—that men who feel either poor or hungry prefer heavier women than men who feel rich or full. We discuss these findings in terms of how patterns of cross-cultural norms may be evinced at the individual level through an implicit psychological mechanism. In their classic study of human sexual behavior, Ford and Beach (1951) stated that ‘‘the cross-cultural evidence makes it clear that there are few, if any, universal standards of sexual attractiveness’’ (p. 86). Subsequent research, however, has documented several apparent universals in preferences for romantic partners. Across all cultures, men care more than women about physical features in potential mates (Buss, 1994); men seek youth (Buss, 1989), facial averageness (Rhodes et al., 2001), and low waist-to-hip ratio (Singh, 1993; Singh & Young, 1995),