Forum:Psychological mechanisms

Forums: Index > Evolutionary psychology forum > Psychological mechanisms

This forum is for the discussion of the concept of psychological mechanisms in evolutionary psychology.

It would be an interesting project to list them. There are probably only a few dozen of consequence.

Ones I have written about are:

Attention reward. This is how people get into cults. It's the motivation for people who become actors. I make the case that the reward chemicals and brain circuits involved in attention reward and status seeking are what makes people vulnerable to drug addiction.

Capture-bonding. This is the mechanism behind Stockholm syndrome, and I make the case that the same mechanism is behind military basic training, battered wife syndrome, and otherwise hard to understand sex practices such as SM and BD.

There is a so far unnamed converse to capture-bonding, the trait to abuse captives to set off capture-bonding. I think that's what was behind the prison abuse both in Iraq and in the famous Stanford prison experiments.

Pair bonding and debonding. Pair bonding is essential for raising children. But if a year or two goes by of sexual relations and no children result, there *should* be a tendency for relations to break up. In the EEA before contraception, unfruitful relations meant one or the other was wasting their time (genetically speaking).

This list needs expansion and more comment.

These are interesting speculations. It will be valuable to the discussion if you can provide references and citations for these ideas. Regards. Dr. Becker-Weidman ^Talk 16:22, 4 December 2007 (UTC)