Copping, Campbell, and Muncer (2014) have recently published an article critical of the psychometric approach to the assessment of life history (LH) strategy. Their purported goal was testing for the convergent validation and examining the psychometric structure of the High-K Strategy Scale (HKSS). As much of the literature on the psychometrics of human LH during the past decade or so has emanated from our research laboratory and those of close collaborators, we have prepared this detailed response. Our response is organized into four main sections: (1) A review of psychometric methods for the assessment of human LH strategy, expounding upon the essence of our approach; (2) our theoretical/conceptual concerns regarding the critique, addressing the broader issues raised by the critique regarding the latent and hierarchical structure of LH strategy; (3) our statistical/methodological concerns regarding the critique, examining the validity and persuasiveness of the empirical case made specifically against the HKSS; and (4) our recommendations for future research that we think might be helpful in closing the gap between the psychometric and biometric approaches to measurement in this area. Clearly stating our theoretical positions, describing our existing body of work, and acknowledging Reply to Copping, Campbell, and Muncer (2014) Evolutionary Psychology -ISSN 1474-7049 -Volume 13(2). 2015.-300-their limitations should assist future researchers in planning and implementing more informed and prudent empirical research that will synthesize the psychometric approach to the assessment of LH strategy with complementary methods.

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Guided by life history theory, the present study (a) developed and provided preliminary validation data for a self-report measure of a childhood unpredictability schema (i.e., a worldview where children perceive other people and future outcomes as unreliable and unpredictable) and (b) tested for the effects of maternal life history strategy and its behavioral components on development of the child's unpredictability schema. Because maternal life history strategy may impact her child's physical, mental, and cognitive/ emotional functioning, the authors included both a general measure of the mother's life history strategy and specific measures of her parental effort and mating effort. Sixtyfive 10 -12-year-old children and their mothers participated in the current study. The sample was economically disadvantaged and ethnically diverse (53% of mothers were of Hispanic/Latino descent). Consistent with life history theory, both maternal mating effort and parental effort were associated with the child's unpredictability schema, with less mating effort and more parental effort predicting a less developed schema. Results also revealed a quadratic "floor effect," whereby higher levels of parental effort showed a curvilinear association with lower levels (i.e., less developed) of child unpredictability schema. The new measure of child unpredictability schema performed as expected and may prove useful for future research in this domain.

Previous developmental research has found that children from households with high shared parenting, childrearing agreement, and equitable division of parental labor experience positive developmental and social outcomes; a major limitation of these studies is that shared parenting measures do not assess the amount of total parental effort the child receives, but instead partitioning the amount of effort between parents. Life History (LH) theory predicts that the total amount of parenting the child receives should produce a greater developmental impact on the future LH strategies of children than precisely how that parental effort was apportioned between mothers and fathers. This report presents a cross-cultural study using convenience samples of university students in Mexico, the United States, and Costa Rica, investigating the relationship of total as well as shared parental effort on family emotional climate and the LH strategy of the participants as young adults. The first study was performed exclusively in Mexico; results indicated that higher levels of shared parenting experienced as a child were associated with Family Emotional Climate also during childhood and with participant adult LH. The second study extended these findings; higher total parental effort predicted shared parenting effort, positive emotional climate, and slower offspring adult life history strategy in the three convenience samples of Mexico, the United States, and Costa Rica.

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