Module 3: Biological-Evolutionary Domain Notes

How Can Evolutionary Psychology Successfully Explain Personality and Individual

Di erences?

By David M. Buss

Child Temperament: How We Start to Become Ourselves 

Temperamental traits

From twin studies, 50-60% of temperament comes from genes

-environment also a ects temperament, making up for the missing ^^

Evocative gene environment correlations

-the environment that the child is not random, but is correlated with genetic in uence behavior

-Override

How Only Being Able to Use Logic to Make Decisions Destroyed a Man’s Life By Drake Baer

( neuroscientist Antonio Damasio )

“high-reason view.” = idea that emotions should be suppressed in order to have a logical
decision

“An important aspect of the rationalist conception is that to obtain the best results, emotions
must be kept out,” 

The diagnosis: Looking at Elliot and medical history, Damasio discovered what, to Plato and TI,
would be strange bedfellows: When emotion was impaired, so was decision-making

somatic (as in body) marker hypothesis = somatic markers

-a way to lter out decisions

-While Elliot’s landscape of potential realities all had “ at” values, healthy people weigh the
potential outcomes that are left after “somatic markers” lter the other possibilities out.

wisdom = accrue lots of somatic knowledge in your life allowing you to make better decisions.
Therein lies the problem of the high-reason view: without the ltering provided by emotions and
their somatic markers, the data sets for any given decision, would be overwhelming.

//Without somatic markers, we fail to automatically reduce the number of possibilities or

choices one can make regarding a decision. As somatic markers enable us to not only logically
deduce a situation, but also ‘feel’ it out.
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