Lassitude: The emotion of being sick

An Adaptationist Framework for Personality Science

“…‘I underestimated you as a friend’, ‘I shouldn't have done that’, and ‘you didn't deserve to be treated that way’). Behavioural indicators that upward recalibration of the WTR has occurred are known to deactivate anger in most circumstances even without actual recompense, again indicating that the function of anger is to recalibrate the mind of the target (Sell, 2005, 2011).…”

“…Evolutionary psychologists have now reverse engineered a large array of putative adaptations in humans. For example, the human mind appears to be equipped with psychological mechanisms designed to estimate the genetic relatedness of self to others and, based on these estimates, regulate kin‐directed cooperation and incest avoidance (Lieberman, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2007; Sznycer, De Smet, Billingsley, & Lieberman, 2016); facilitate learning in children about which local plants are edible via observations of adults' plant consumption (Wertz & Wynn, 2014); regulate behaviour in order to prevent and mitigate the deleterious effects of pathogen exposure (Murray & Schaller, 2016; Schrock, Snodgrass, & Sugiyama, 2020; Tybur, Lieberman, Kurzban, & DeScioli, 2013); reason about the contingencies of social exchange and exclude cheaters and free‐riders from cooperation (Cosmides et al, 2010; Delton, Cosmides, Guemo, Robertson, & Tooby, 2012); represent the features of interdependent social situations (Balliet, Tybur, & Van Lange, 2017); motivate people to engage in third‐party punishment in order to deter future acts of exploitation toward oneself (Krasnow et al, 2016); motivate facultative coalitional aggression against other groups (Manson et al, 1991; Wrangham & Glowacki, 2012); track markers of social alliances (Pietraszewski, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2014); generate moral sentiments about domain‐specific aspects of social life (Barrett et al, 2016; Boyer, 2007; Curry, Mullins, & Whitehouse, 2019; Petersen et al, 2012; Pinsof & Haselton, 2016); acquire local norms about the contexts of cooperation (Apicella & Silk, 2019; House et al, 2020); and compute the social value of self (Denissen, Penke, Schmitt, & Van Aken, 2008; Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995) and others (Buss et al, 1990; Delton & Robertson, 2012; Durkee, Lukaszewski, & Buss, 2019; Eisenbruch, Grillot, Maestripieri, & Roney, 2016; Sznycer et al, 2016; von Rueden, Gurven, & Kaplan, 2008) (for recent reviews, see Buss, 2015; Buss, 2019).…”

“…The anger programme appears to be a psychological adaptation designed to recalibrate how much weight the target of the anger attaches to one's welfare when that weight is deemed insufficient (Sell, 2005, 2011; Sell et al, 2017; Sell, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2009). This recalibrational theory of anger resulted from an application of the adaptationist toolkit as outlined earlier.…”

“…threats, aggressive posturing, and actual aggression) or to withhold cooperative value (e.g. the silent treatment and avoidance) (Buss, 1991b; Hagen & Rosenström, 2016; Molho, Tybur, Güler, Balliet, & Hofmann, 2017; Sell, 2011).…”

“…Likewise, it would not afford the prediction that individual differences in anger's activation threshold will be calibrated to relative bargaining power (Goetz & Maria, 2019; Sell et al, 2009). Neither would it lead to the prediction that anger will deactivate on the basis of behavioural evidence that the target has upwardly recalibrated their WTR toward the self, without material recompense (Sell, 2005, 2011). These and many other of anger's design features allow us to predict anger's situation–specific activation and deactivation, toward whom anger will be directed, in whom anger will be more or less likely to activate in response to a given transgression, and which anger–motivated behaviours are more or less likely to be expressed in a given instance (e.g.…”