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Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Introduction: Evolutionary Approaches to the Emotions

Charles Darwin launched the evolutionary study of emotion with his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. However, partly for historical reasons, the book had a narrow emphasis, focusing on the continuity of emotional expression between humans and nonhuman animals. The prevailing view in Darwin’s Victorian England was that God had endowed humans with specific facial muscles that He had specially crafted to allow humans to communicate their emotions to one another (e.g., Keltner et al. 2014). In such a social climate, Darwin’s goal was to demonstrate to the scientific community that human facial expressions bore the stamp of their animal ancestry, and that close examination of emotion expressions demonstrated the phylogenetic continuity between humans and other species (Darwin 1872). In the century and a half since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Darwin 1859), things have changed...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

    Laith Al-Shawaf

  2. College of Life Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, Germany

    Laith Al-Shawaf

  3. School of Psychology and Exercise Science, Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA, Australia

    David M. G. Lewis

Authors
  1. Laith Al-Shawaf
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  2. David M. G. Lewis
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Correspondence to Laith Al-Shawaf .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Institute of Psychology, University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland

    Monika Wróbel

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Al-Shawaf, L., Lewis, D.M.G. (2020). Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_516

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