Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture

Joseph Campos - On the Epigenesis of Fear in the Human Infant
2006-04-24 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Joseph Campos: UC Berkeley Department of PsychologyThere is a fascinating paradox about fear of heights in humans and some animal species. Such fear has enormous biological adaptive value, represents a true life-span emotional reaction, and constitutes one of the strongest and most reliably-elicited fears in the human. As such, one would expect fear of heights to be innate, or under strong maturational control. Indeed, until recently, it was so considered. However, there is now no doubt that fear of heights develops as the result of experience, more specifically experiences linked to the onset of self-produced locomotion. It is not a maturational or innate event.
What creates fear of heights and how does locomotor experience play a role in its ontogeny? We can rule out three likely candidates as playing a causal role. Depth perception is well established before such fear develops; falling experiences are relatively rare; and maternal emotional signaling has little if any impact at the age of onset of locomotion. What, then, may be the process(es) by which such biologically-adaptive wariness comes about?
In this talk, evidence is presented for the role of a discrepancy between sensory systems in the ontogeny of these fears. The discrepancy we propose to be playing a causal role is related to the discrepancy that in adults makes heights â€œdizzying.â€ More specifically, one experiences height vertigo when information reaches the brain that the head and body is moving (even minutely so), but visual information discrepantly fails to confirm such self-movement. It turns out that infants have good vestibular and kinesthetic information about self-movement from early in life, but lack responsiveness to flow in the visual periphery until after the acquisition of locomotor experience. So, only after â€œvisual proprioceptionâ€ becomes functional is the infant capable of experiencing the discrepancy that produces height vertigo.
The talk will:
(a) Visually illustrate what visual proprioception is (it is not a phenomenon well-known to behavioral scientists),
(b) Provide evidence for the role of locomotor experience on visual proprioception, and
(c) Present results of two studies showing correlations between responsiveness to optic flow and the probability of showing wariness of heights in infants at two different ages.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Campos_24.4.06.doc

Chris Guzelian - Evolution, Selfish Lies, and Free Speech
2006-04-17 00:00
Chris Guzelian: Searle Scholar, Northwestern University School of LawEvidence increasingly suggests that selection between competing ideas to become a prevailing social belief may be strongly influenced by evolutionarily descended limitations on human sensory and mental capabilities. Scholars posit that these limitations permit many “selfish” ideas to gain social traction and spread epidemically, driving out and shutting out truth from collective understanding in the selection process. An evolutionary perspective, combined with settled principles of free speech law, indicates that the explicit combating of various selfish false ideas through technological, educational, legal, financial, or other means may be necessary to avoid self-sustaining mass delusions in a globalizing world.

Jeffrey Davis - Fisher's Sociological Imagination
2006-04-10 00:00
Jeffrey Davis: California State University Long Beach Department of SociologyFisher is widely known for his extraordinary contributions to population genetics and evolutionary biology. His sociological insights have received far less attention, even though five of the twelve chapters of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection are devoted to developing a theory of the evolutionary consequences of human social organization. For my presentation, I will review Fisher’s sociology and the parameters of his model of social organization. I also offer some extensions to Fisher’s model. In conclusion, I contend that Fisher’s insights provide the basis of a rich theoretical research program in evolutionary sociology.

Peter Whybrow - American Mania: When More Is Not Enough
2006-04-03 00:00
Peter Whybrow: UCLA David Geffen School of MedicineDr. Whybrow poses the question, â€œAre we Americans becoming the first addicts of the technological age?â€ Despite an astonishing appetite for life, more and more Americans are feeling overworked and dissatisfied in the worldâ€™s most affluent nation, epidemic rates of stress, anxiety, depression, obesity, and time urgency are now grudgingly accepted as part of everyday existenceâ€”they signal the American Dream gone awry. Drawing upon economics, history, evolutionary psychology, and scientific case studies, Dr. Whybrow ground the extraordinary achievements and excessive consumption of the American nation in an understanding of the biology of human craving and the reward system of the brainâ€”offering a comprehensive physical explanation for the addictive mania of consumerism. Whybrow shows how human biology is ill equipped to cope with the demands of the 24/7, global, information-saturated, rapid-fire culture we not only have created but also have come to crave. Dr. Whybrow concludes with a discussion of how one may step back from this treadmill to live a healthful life. But he also offers a cautionary tale: As a society if we do not learn to curtail our cravings, we may be entering a self-destructive phase. Fundamental to change will be an objective evaluation of the laissez-faire market ideology and a reinvigoration of our role as citizens in this driven consumer culture.

Terrence Deacon - Devo-Devo: How Relaxed Selection Can Contribute To The Evolution And Self-Organization Of Complexity
2006-03-13 00:00
Terrence Deacon: UC Berkeley Department of AnthropologyAlthough biologists have long recognized examples of regressive processes in evolution as well as a role for regressive processes in the development of brains, research interest tends to focus on presumably constructive and progressive processes under the influence of natural selection. Particularly in the case of human brains and their evolution, it is generally assumed that the neurological differences underlying the complexity of human language abilities must have arisen due to progressive improvements of function via selection favoring these traits. In this talk I will explore an alternative possibility: that devolutionary loss-of-function due to reduced selection,
including degradation of developmental-genetic specificity, may contribute to the evolution of novel complex neural functions, such as language. The general logic of this argument originates from a critique of a commonly cited evolutionary mechanism: the Baldwin Effect. Although this theoretical â€œeffectâ€ is often invoked as an evolutionary mechanism leading from functional plasticity to increased specificity of genetic control, biological examples and simulation studies will be presented that show that the opposite effect is more likely, and also that there are other surprising correlates of this process. An animal exampleâ€”song production in a domesticated species of finchâ€”illustrates this effect and its paradoxical consequence. In this breed, increasingly complex song structure, expanded involvement of forebrain mechanisms, greater flexibility of behavior, and a larger contribution from social learning evolved without positive selection for these traits. Instead, these birds were bred for feather coloration. Absence of selection on song appears to have led to evolutionary degradation of song control specificity and with it unmasking of otherwise hidden synergies among diverse brain systems able to play some role in song structure. These results suggest some informative parallels with features of human language functions, and the possibility that regressive evolutionary processes might play an important role in the evolution of biological complexity more generally.

Leeat Yariv - Conformity In The Lab
2006-03-06 00:00
Leeat Yariv: Caltech Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, UCLA Department of EconomicsIn this talk, I will briefly survey the existing literature on social learning and conformity (both theoretical and experimental) and then present evidence from an array of new experiments disentangling conformity, an intrinsic taste to follow others, from informational herding in a sequential choice setting. In these experiments, we use a design reminiscent of the standard social learning setup in which subjects choose the type of information they observe before making a decision. Namely, subjects choose between observing a private and informative signal or observing a social signal manifested in the history of play of predecessors who have not chosen a private signal. Even though the latter type is essentially a word of mouth signal, entailing no statistical information, a significant fraction of subjects choose it persistently. Allowing for payoff externalities by paying subjects according to a collective action chosen by a majority vote amplifies the results. So does an increase in the stakes. Our design allows us to rule out alternative explanations the literature proposes such as confusion and inequality aversion.

Teresa Seeman - Exploring a Bio-Psychosocial Model of Cumulative Risk â€“ Biological Pathways Linking Life Experience and Health Outcome in Aging
2006-02-27 00:00
Teresa Seeman : UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine Division of GeriatricsDr. Seeman will discuss evidence linking socio-economic, social and psychological resources to trajectories of health and aging and the multiple biological pathways through which these factors appear to impact on health outcomes over the life course. Possible sex and/or ethnic differences in these patterns of association will also be discussed.

John Patton - Coalitional Psychology and the Conundrum of Altruism: a case from the Ecuadorian Amazon
2006-02-13 00:00
John Patton: California State University Fullerton Department of AnthropologyThe search for solutions to the conundrum of altruism is a central focus of evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior. The focus of this talk is to present data on cooperation collected among horticultural foragers in the Ecuadorian Amazon to argue that a better understanding of the conundrum of altruism, and its constraints, can be gained by examining human cooperation as an aspect of an evolved coalitional psychology. Coalitional psychology is that aspect of human nature designed to construct mental representations of coalitional structures, to triangulate oneself and others within coalitional structures, to reason about and pursue behavioral strategies within
coalitional contexts, and to evoke emotional states that led to actions that result from or create coalitional consequences. Apart from
explicit or implicit attempts to detect group boundaries (ethnic, spatial, or political) and the collection of basic demographic data,
evolutionary ethnographers do not routinely collect data on coalitional structures. Without such data it is difficult to assess the influences
of coalitional thinking on cooperation which predicts that people will weigh the costs and benefits of cooperating differently depending on
their position within their coalitional. Even in egalitarian societies some people are more equal than others. In this talk I will integrate
data on coalitional structure derived from network analysis techniques, with data on behavior within three separate domains of cooperation
(status allocation, meat sharing, and experimental economic games) to illustrate influences of an evolved coalitional psychology on patterns of human cooperation.

Gail Heyman - Children's Reasoning about People as Source of Information
2006-02-06 00:00
Gail Heyman: UCSD Department of PsychologyThe human capacity to acquire knowledge from others, rather than only relying upon what can be observed or experienced directly, opens vast opportunities for learning. As a result of this capacity, humans are highly adaptable across many contexts. However, the use of such
information can also pose difficulties. For example, sources may provide incorrect or misleading information, either intentionally or unintentionally. In this talk, I will focus on children’s evaluation of others as sources of information within one particular context: when
people talk about themselves. The findings I will present, which include data collected in the U.S. and in China, address how children’s reasoning is affected by the content of the message, and by the social context in which the communication occurs.

Rafael NuÃ±ez - Embodied Cognition, Objectivity, and Truth: Lessons from Mathematics and Spatial Construals of Time in Aymara
2006-01-30 00:00
Rafael NuÃ±ez: UCSD Department of Cognitive ScienceHow can we “objectively” share abstract entities with others, in a stable and consistent way? How can we evaluate “Truth” when purely imaginary entities are concerned? Mathematics provides a very intriguing case for studying these questions. Indeed, mathematics, on the one hand deals with purely imaginary entities (e.g., a Euclidean point has only location, but no extension! … And there is no such “real” thing in the entire universe!), and on the other hand, it provides extremely stable patterns of true-valued inferences (i.e., theorems) that once proved, stayed proved for ever (e.g., the Pythagorean Theorem). In this talk I will analyze these issues by looking at (1) my own work on the Cognitive Science of Mathematics (with George Lakoff) taking examples from set and hyperset theory, and (2) my field work in the Andes’ highlands studying–with convergent linguistic-gestural-ethnographic methods–a very peculiar form of spatial construal of time in the Aymara culture. I’ll address the question of the role of axiom systems in generating and sustaining truth, and will show that the nature of truth and objectivity in abstract conceptual systems lie on the intricacies of the underlying bodily-grounded human cognitive mechanisms (e.g., conceptual metaphors, metonymies, analogies, blends) that make them possible.

Steven Gaulin - A Real-World Foraging Task Yields a Female Advantage and Significant Content Effects.
2006-01-23 00:00
Steven Gaulin: UCSB Department of AnthropologyThough Silverman and Eals division-of-foraging-labor hypothesis cannot explain the cross-species distribution of sex differences in spatial ability, it does make a novel prediction: women will more accurately remember the location of stationary resources. Unfortunately, Silverman and Ealsâ€™ own tests of this hypothesis have yielded weak and inconsistent support, possibly because the tasks used to assess the hypothesized female advantage lack ecological validity. I will present results of a controlled field study carried out at a large farmers market. Women performed significantly better than men at remembering the location of food items they had tasted, but not at remembering the location of non-food landmarks. In addition, accuracy was significantly correlated with the caloric content of food items, suggesting specialization of this particular cognitive system.

Dan Posner - Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods Provision in Kampala, Uganda: An Experimental Approach
2006-01-09 00:00
Dan Posner: UCLA Department of Political Science

Craig McKenzie - Framing Effects and Rationality
2005-12-05 00:00
Craig McKenzie: UC San Diego Department of PsychologyFraming effects are said to occur when “equivalent” redescriptions of objects or outcomes lead to different preferences or judgments. For example, a medical treatment is seen more favorably when described as resulting in “90% survival” rather than “10% mortality.” Such effects are widely considered to be classic violations of rationality. However, if framing effects are to be considered irrational, it is not sufficient that the frames in question be logically equivalent. Instead, they must be information equivalent, which means that no choice-relevant inferences can be drawn from the speaker’s choice of frame. However, logically equivalent frames used by researchers are often information non-equivalent. For example, we have shown that a speaker’s choice of attribute frame “leaks” information about relative abundance, and that listeners “absorb” the information. Information leakage provides a natural (and rational) explanation of attribute framing effects. Extensions of the information leakage approach to framing effects in risky choice, inference tasks, consumer behavior, and policy defaults will also be discussed.

Gregory F. Grether - Environmental Change, Phenotypic Plasticity and Genetic Compensation
2005-11-28 00:00
Gregory F. Grether: UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyNormal development depends on specific environmental inputs. Consequently, when a species encounters novel environmental conditions, some traits may develop abnormally. Changes in the environment can occur, for example, because of climate change or habitat degradation. Like genetic mutations, most environmental perturbations of development are detrimental, and thus natural selection would usually be expected to favor genetic changes that gradually restore the ancestral form of the trait in the new environment. I recently coined the term “genetic compensation” to describe this form of adaptive evolution. When genetic compensation occurs along a spatial environmental gradient, it partially or completely masks the effects of the gradient on trait development. This means that populations of a species that look the same in the wild may develop quite differently if placed in a common environment. In addition, genetic compensation may lead to a cryptic form of reproductive isolation between populations, explain some puzzling cases in which heritable traits exposed to strong directional selection fail to show the expected evolutionary response, and complicate efforts to monitor populations for signs of environmental deterioration. In this talk, I will explain how genetic compensation differs from related phenomena, such as genetic assimilation and canalization, and review putative examples to illustrate the above points.

Shinobu Kitayama - Voluntary Settlement and the Spirit of Independence
2005-11-21 00:00
Shinobu Kitayama: University of Michigan Department of PsychologyThere is a general consensus that the history of voluntary settlement in the western frontier constitutes a major element of American individualism. Yet, if voluntary settlement is a causal factor that promoted tacit beliefs and practices of independent agency, there should be similar beliefs and practices among a group of people even in the midst of an entirely different cultural ethos of interdependence as long as the group had undergone voluntary settlement in the recent past. We thus examined residents of Japanâ€™s northern island (Hokkaido). Hokkaido was extensively settled by ethnic Japanese from the 1870â€™s for several decades. Many of the current residents of Hokkaido are the descendents of the original settlers from this period. As predicted, Japanese socialized and/or immersed in Hokkaido were nearly as likely as European Americans in North America to commit a dispositional bias in causal attribution, to associate happiness with personal achievement, and to show a personal dissonance effect wherein self-justification is motivated by a threat to personal self-images. In contrast, these marker effects of independent agency were largely absent for non-Hokkaido residents in Japan. Implications for theories of cultural change are discussed.

Jeffrey Brantingham - Gone in 6 Seconds: the Foraging Behavior of Los Angeles Car Thieves
2005-11-14 00:00
Jeffrey Brantingham: UCLA Department of Anthropology How specialized is your average Los Angeles “auto boost”? This talk draws on both new and classic foraging models to examine the search strategies deployed by Los Angeles car thieves and evaluates the decision making process underlying how they select individual cars to steal. It seems plausible that many of the foraging behaviors deployed by car thieves are linked to psychological and behavioral capacities that evolved among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It is less likely that there is specialized (or broken) cognitive module linked to “deviant behavior”. A dash of both trial-and-error and social learning mixed with generalized psychological and behavioral capacities is sufficient to generate very effective car thieves.

Margo Wilson & Martin Daly - Carpe diem: adaptation and devaluing the future
2005-11-07 00:00
Margo Wilson & Martin Daly: McMaster University Department of PsychologyThe future is almost always worth less to organisms than the present, and evolved psychologies and physiologies ‘discount’ it accordingly. However, exactly how they do so, how they should do so, and whether real discount functions match theoretical expectations, are unresolved and/or controversial in various details, which will be the focus of discussion.

Paul Zak - Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans
2005-10-31 00:00
Paul Zak: Claremont Graduate University Neuroendocrine Foundations of Trust Department of EconomicsThe traditional view in economics is that individuals respond to incentives, but absent strong incentives to the contrary selfishness prevails. Moreover, this â€œgreed is goodâ€ approach is deemed â€œrationalâ€ behavior. Nevertheless, in daily interactions and in numerous laboratory studies, a high degree of cooperative behavior prevailsâ€”even among strangers. A possible explanation for the substantial amount of â€œirrationalâ€ behavior observed in markets (and elsewhere) is that humans are a highly social species and to an extent value what other humans think of them. This behavior can be termed trustworthinessâ€”cooperating when someone places trust in us. A number of recent experiments from my lab have demonstrated that the neuroactive hormone oxytocin facilitates trust between strangers, and appears to induce trustworthiness. In rodents, oxytocin has been associated with maternal bonding, pro-social behaviors, and in some species long-term pair bonds, but prior to the work reviewed here, the behavioral effects of oxytocin in humans had not been studied. This presentation discusses the neurobiology of positive social behaviors and how these are facilitated by oxytocin. My experiments show that positive social signals cause oxytocin to be released by the brain, producing an unconscious attachment to a stranger.

Francisco J. Ayala - Darwin's Greatest Discovery: Natural Selection versus Intelligent Design
2005-10-24 00:00
Francisco J. Ayala: UCI Departments of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and PhilosophyDarwin is deservedly given credit for the theory of biological evolution. He accumulated evidence demonstrating that organisms evolve and diversify through time. Most important, however, is that he discovered natural selection, the process that accounts for the adaptive organization of organisms and their features; that is, their “design.” But the design of organisms is not intelligent, as it would be expected from an engineer, but imperfect and worse: the defects, dysfunctions, oddities, waste-and even cruelty and sadism if judged by human values-that pervade the living world are incompatible with their being the outcome of an intelligent designer, unless this designer would also be intentionally deceitful and malevolent.

Susan Perry - Social learning in wild capuchin monkeys
2005-10-17 00:00
Susan Perry: UCLA Department of AnthropologyRecently, discoveries of site-specific behavioral patterns such as the use of hammers and anvils or stick tools in extractive foraging have been documented in wild ape populations. Such discoveries have given rise to much speculation regarding the evolution of cultural capacities in humans, and claims have been made that chimpanzees have a greater capacity for â€œcultureâ€ than any other nonhuman animal. However, theoretical models used to predict the circumstances under which social learning is expected to become important would not predict unusually high reliance on social learning to be unique to apes. Capuchin monkeys, for example, by virtue of their gregarious, tolerant nature, omnivory, extreme dependence on alliance partners, and extractive foraging niche, would be predicted to be highly reliant on social learning.
In this talk, I present the findings of a cross-site investigation (4 study sites, 13 social groups, 10 researchers, 19,000 hrs of data) documenting behavioral variation in social conventions and foraging techniques in white-faced capuchin monkeys. Whereas the ape â€œcultureâ€ researchers stopped at cross-site comparisons and declared the observed variation to be cultural by process of elimination, I continued to investigate the source of the variation by conducting cross-sectional and developmental studies in my data base from Lomas Barbudal (5 social groups, roughly 30,000 hrs of data dating from 1990). In this talk I present data on social conventions and also data on the acquisition of foraging techniques in young capuchins. Social influence is most important between the ages of 2-4 years, and by age 5, capuchins have conformed to the technique they observed most. This conformity takes place over a very slow time scale, contrary to theoretical expectations about the speed of social learning.

Antoine Bechara - Decision-Making and Impulse Control After Frontal Lobe Injuries
2005-10-10 00:00
Antoine Bechara: USC Department of PsychologyFor a long time, the prefrontal cortex has been considered a â€œnon-functionalâ€ brain area, and understanding its function has lagged behind nearly all other areas. This is no longer true since appreciation of the vital role that this brain region plays in adaptive behaviors, and especially decision-making, is now evident more than ever. I will highlight the recent progress that has been made in this area of research. Decision-making is a term often referred to in the psychological literature as one of the â€œexecutive functionsâ€, which play a role in managing (like an executive) other cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and language. Considerable research efforts have been directed towards differentiating various processes of executive functions, but much of this effort in the past has focused on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPC) sector. I will focus on decision-making and its link to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), and highlights the role of evolution in shaping the function of this area of the brain.

Joseph Manson - Father-Daughter Inbreeding Avoidance Reduces Male Reproductive Skew in a Wild Primate Population
2005-10-03 00:00
Joseph Manson: UCLA Department of AnthropologyInbreeding reduces fitness in various taxa, and several behavioral and physiological mechanisms have evolved that inhibit fertile matings between close kin. Most commonly, members of one or both sexes disperse before breeding. In primates, males usually disperse and females often benefit from lifelong relationships with maternal kin within the group. Females thus risk breeding with their father if the tenure length of the dominant male, who usually sires most group offspring, exceeds the time it takes daughters to mature. Attempts to determine whether such co-resident father-daughter pairs systematically avoid inbreeding have produced equivocal results, and no published studies have addressed this question by genetically ascertaining paternity in a wild population. We determined paternity for 117 wild white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus) born into our study population. As expected, alpha males dominated reproduction. However, while siring the great majority (79%) of the offspring born to unrelated females, alphas sired only 6% (1 of 17) of the offspring conceived by their daughters during their tenures, providing evidence for effective inbreeding avoidance without female dispersal.

Morten Christiansen - The Evolution of Languages and Genes
2005-06-06 00:00
Morten Christiansen: Cornell University Department of Psychology Language is undoubtedly governed by innate constraints. Otherwise, it is difficult to account for the close match between the intricate structure of languages and the mechanisms involved in acquiring and processing them. Innate constraints are also needed to explain the existence of language universals; that is, why languages tend to be structured and used in certain ways and not others. Moreover, no other animal communication system appears to have the same kind of complex linguistic properties as found in human language. But does this necessarily mean that humans have evolved genes specifically to encode innate constraints on language? In this talk, I argue that such ‘language genes’ are an unlikely outcome of human evolution. Instead, corroborated by a series of language evolution simulations, I suggest that the exquisite fit between humans and language has arisen because languages themselves have evolved to fit human learning mechanisms existing prior to the emergence of linguistic communication. On this account, the apparently ‘idiosyncratic’ language universals derive from non-linguistic constraints on learning and processing in these mechanisms, many of which have evolved specifically to support complex human cognition.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Christiansen_6.6.05_1.pdf

Douglas Wallace - Human Origins, Genes and Myths: A Mitochondrial DNA Journey
2005-05-23 00:00
Douglas Wallace: UC Irvine Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyThe investigation of human origins and migrations has been greatly advanced by the analysis of human genetic variation to determine the relationships between different human populations. Such studies have permitted demonstration of the recent African origin of humans, the reconstruction of ancient migrations, and the correlation of human genetic history with linguistic affiliations. The first component of the human genome to be used in these investigations was the maternally-inherited human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which codes for key proteins involved in the conversion of dietary calories in into ATP to fuel work and heat to maintain our body temperature. Variation in the human mtDNA has been found to be encompassed in a single dichotomously branching tree with the different branches of the tree correlating dramatically with the geographic distribution of indigenous peoples from around the world. The mtDNA correlation with human populations is much greater than that seen for either the paternally-inherited Y chromosome or the biparentally inherited autosomes. We now believe that this correlation is because variation in the mtDNA permitted our ancestors to adapt to the increasingly cold environments that they encountered as they migrated out-of-Africa and into temperate Eurasia and arctic Siberia. Hence, selection has stabilized the geographic distribution of mtDNA variation such that mtDNA variation has sustained the distribution of the earliest human incursions around the world. This unique aspect of the mtDNA now makes mtDNA variation a particularly valuable tool for the analysis of deep cultural associations and origins. This is currently proving to be the case in studies on the origins and radiation of Native America languages and myths.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Wallace_23.5.05_1.pdf

Piotr Winkielman - Unconscious Emotion
2005-05-16 00:00
Piotr Winkielman: UC San Diego Department of PsychologyMy talk explores the relation between emotion and conscious experience. Conscious feelings are typically viewed as a central and necessary ingredient of emotion. In contrast, I will argue that emotion also can be genuinely unconscious (i.e., occur without the accompanying subjective experience). Theoretically, my argument is anchored in evolutionary considerations that systems underlying basic emotions originated prior to systems for supporting conscious awareness, and in functional considerations that consciousness is often unnecessary for emotions to do their job. These considerations are consistent with evidence from neuroscience and psychology. Neuroscience evidence suggests that subcortical brain systems, including the brain stem and the â€œlimbic systemâ€ underlie both basic â€˜â€˜liking/dislikingâ€™â€™ reactions and more complex reactions, such as fear, disgust, or desire. Further, psychological evidence suggests that positive and negative reactions can be elicited subliminally and remain inaccessible to introspection. Despite the absence of subjective feelings in such cases, subliminally induced affective reactions still influence peopleâ€™s preference judgments, monetary decision and even complex behavior, such as the amount of beverage they consume. Finally, I will discuss the interactions of conscious and unconscious components of emotion, and conditions under which these components become coupled and decoupled.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Winkielman_16.5.05_b.pdf

Jennie Pyers - Building belief: The relationship between language and theory of mind understanding in learners of an emerging sign language in Nicaragua
2005-05-09 00:00
Jennie Pyers: UC Berkeley Department of PsychologyFalse-belief understanding is the non-egocentric ability to recognize that one’s own thoughts and beliefs can be different from others’, and
different from real-world events (i.e., mistaken). Research on early child development suggests that false-belief understanding is contingent
upon language development. Recent findings from an emergent sign language in Nicaragua suggest that deaf individuals exposed to a less
complex version of the language show deficits in false-belief understanding, whereas those exposed to a more complex version of the
language develop normally. Without complex language, human interaction is insufficient to support the development of a mature social
understanding, specifically that of false belief.

Brian Lickel - Affective Mechanisms for Managing Intergroup Retribution
2005-05-02 00:00
Brian Lickel: University of Southern California Department of PsychologyIn this talk, Iâ€™ll present data examining how people think about and react to the wrong-doing of ingroup members. In particular, Iâ€™ll describe affective reactions of self-blame (shame, guilt, ingroup directed anger) that people sometimes experience when a member of their ingroup harms an outgroup. I argue that these affective reactions exist as a functional response to the problem of group-based or collective responsibility (e.g., blood revenge) and I will describe how the behavior that results from feelings of shame, guilt, or ingroup directed anger may reduce the extent to which a harmed outgroup engages in retaliation after a provocation.

Sang-Hee Lee - Old Is Young: Longevity in Human Evolution
2005-04-25 00:00
Sang-Hee Lee: UC Riverside Department of AnthropologyIncreased longevity, expressed as number of individuals surviving to older adulthood, represents one of the ways the human life history pattern differs from other primates. We assessed changes in longevity with the ratio of older to younger adults (OY ratio) in four hominin dental samples from successive time periods, and determining the significance of differences in these ratios. While there is significant increased longevity between all groups indicating a trend of increased adult survivorship over the course of human evolution, there is a dramatic increase in longevity in the modern humans of the Early Upper Paleolithic. We then addressed whether longevity increased as a result of cultural/adaptive change in Upper Paleolithic Europe or whether it was introduced to Europe as a part of modern human biology, comparing Western Asia and European samples. We find that the Upper Paleolithic OY ratio is more than double that of the Middle Paleolithic moderns; in contrast, the OY ratios of the two West Asian Middle Paleolithic groups are not significantly different from each other. However, the OY ratios of both West Asian Moderns and Neandertals are significantly higher than the European Neandertal ratio. Considering cultural versus taxonomic differences, we conclude that the increase in adult survivorship associated with the Upper Paleolithic may reflect an important cultural adaptation promoting the demographic and material representations of modernity. Further research is discussed.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Lee1_4.25.05.pdf

Raymond Gibbs - Embodied metaphor in language, thought, and culture
2005-04-18 00:00
Raymond Gibbs: UC Santa Cruz Department of PsychologyMetaphor is traditionally viewed as a special use of language. But recent research from cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics suggests that metaphor is ubiquitous in language and a fundamental part of human conceptual systems. I will argue in this talk that metaphor is also deeply rooted in recurring aspects of embodied experience that serves as the grounding for significant parts of language, thought, and culture. Particular attention is given to recent experimental evidence showing that metaphor use arises from embodied simulations that people engage in during in-the-moment reasoning, speaking, and understanding.

Daniel M.T. Fessler - Cringing before others' eyes: A cross-cultural investigation of the evolution of shame
2005-04-11 00:00
Daniel M.T. Fessler: UCLA Department of AnthropologyCross-cultural comparisons can a) illuminate the manner in which cultures differentially highlight, ignore, and group various facets of emotional experience, and b) shed light on our evolved species-typical emotional architecture. In many societies, concern with shame is one of the principal factors regulating social behavior. Three studies conducted in Bengkulu (Indonesia) and California explored the nature and experience of shame in two disparate cultures. Study 1, perceived term use frequency, indicated that shame is more prominent in Bengkulu, a collectivistic culture, than in California, an individualistic culture. Study 2, comparing naturally occurring shame events (Bengkulu) with reports thereof (California), revealed that shame is associated with guilt-like accounts in California but not in Bengkulu, and subordinance events in Bengkulu but not in California; published reports suggest that the latter pattern is prominent worldwide. Study 3 mapped the semantic domain of shame using a synonym task; again, guilt was prominent in California, subordinance in Bengkulu. Because shame is overshadowed by guilt in individualistic cultures, and because these cultures downplay aversive emotions associated with subordinance, a fuller understanding of shame is best arrived at through the study of collectivistic cultures such as Bengkulu. After reviewing evolutionary theories on the origins and functions of shame, I evaluate these perspectives in light of facets of this emotion evident in Bengkulu and elsewhere. The available data are consistent with the proposition that shame evolved from a rank-related emotion and, while motivating prestige competition, cooperation, and conformity, nevertheless continues to play this role in contemporary humans.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Fessler_4-11-05.pdf
