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We developed a cascade model to reconstruct the hypothesized developmental progression from (1) increased resource instability during childhood to (2) decreased maternal sensitivity during childhood to (3) social vulnerability cognitive schemata to (4) faster life history strategies to (5) decreased behavioral regulation to (6) more pronounced “Dark Triad” personalities to (7) higher levels of interpersonal aggression in adulthood. The hypothesized cascade model also evaluated the cross-cultural generality of this theoretically-specified developmental progression across a sampling of different societies: (1) the United States of America (N=144); (2) Mexico (N=118); (3) Brazil (N=1091, distributed across 3 data collection sites); (4) Sweden (N=144); and (5) the United Kingdom (N=260). Out of 21 interactive tests of the cross-cultural robustness of the main model parameters, only five reached statistical significance, and were relatively small in magnitude compared to their main effects. In no case did the magnitude and direction of the interaction completely reverse that of the corresponding main effect of the predictor, but merely either augmented or attenuated it somewhat across the affected study sites. We conclude that the results generally supported both the configural and metric invariance of the cascade model to a relatively high, albeit imperfect, degree.

After many waves of out-migration from Africa, different human populations evolved within a great diversity of physical and community ecologies. These ambient ecologies should have at least partially determined the selective pressures that shaped the evolution and geographical distribution of human cognitive abilities across different parts of the world. Three different ecological hypotheses have been advanced to explain human global variation in intelligence: (1) cold winters theory (Lynn, 1991), (2) parasite stress theory (Eppig, Fincher, & Thornhill, 2010), and (3) life history theory (Rushton, 1999, 2000). To examine and summarize the relations among these and other ecological parameters, we divided a sample of 98 national polities for which we had sufficient information into zoogeographical regions (Wallace, 1876; Holt et al., 2013). We selected only those regions for this analysis that were still inhabited mostly by the aboriginal populations that were present there prior to the fifteenth century AD. We found that these zoogeographical regions explained 71.4% of the variance among national polities in our best measure of human cognitive ability, and also more concisely encapsulated the preponderance of the more specific information contained within the sampled set of continuous ecological parameters.

Conceptually driven by life history theory, the current study investigated a hypothesized hierarchy of behaviors leading to men's perpetration of violence in intimate relationships. Using a series of hierarchical regressions, we tested a causal cascade model on data provided by 114 men in a committed romantic relationship. The results supported the hypothesized hierarchy of sociodevelopmental events: (1) men's childhood experiences with their parents’ parental effort predicted men's life history strategies; (2) men's life history strategies predicted men's behavioral self-regulation; (3) men's self-regulation predicted men's perceptions of partner infidelity risk; (4) perceptions of infidelity risk predicted men's frequency of engagement in nonviolent mate retention behaviors; (5) men's mate retention behaviors predicted men's frequency of partner-directed violence. The overall cascade model explained 36% of variance in men's partner-directed violence.

In the present research. we examined in a sample of 500 adults, aged 25 to 50 years, from the five major ethnic groups in Suriname, the association between father absence during childhood and the development of either a fast or slow life history strategy as measured with the 20-item Mini-K. The results showed that even when controlling for educational level, income level, and civil status, father absence was strongly related to life history strategy, with those with a father who left before the age of 13 reporting a faster life history than those whose father left later, or had been present during all childhood. Although the ethnic groups differed considerably in the prevalence of father absence, the association between father absence and life history strategy did not differ between the ethnic groups. Neither was there an association between gender and life history strategy.

We tracked the relative integration and differentiation among life history traits over the period spanning AD 1800–1999 in the Britannic and Gallic biocultural groups. We found that Britannic populations tended toward greater strategic differentiation, while Gallic populations tended toward greater strategic integration. The dynamics of between-group competition between these two erstwhile rival biocultural groups were hypothesized as driving these processes. We constructed a latent factor that specifically sought to measure between-group competition and residualized it for the logarithmic effects of time. We found a significantly asymmetrical impact of between-group competition, where the between-group competition factor appeared to be driving the diachronic integration in Gallic populations but had no significantly corresponding influence on the parallel process of diachronic differentiation in Britannic populations. This suggests that the latter process was attributable to some alternative and unmeasured causes, such as the resource abundance consequent to territorial expansion rather than contraction.

This paper explores how Early Life Stress (ELS) and Life History (LH) strategy impact personality and attitudes toward infidelity, mating effort, and casual sex. A sample of 300 participants reported biodemographic behavioral outcomes, such as their number of lifetime sex partners, which correlated with ELS, LH strategy, and unrestricted sociosexual attitudes (albeit not strongly). A structural equations model was specified and demonstrated that effects of ELS and LH on unrestricted sociosexual attitudes were partially mediated through psychopathy. ELS, LH, and an antagonistic social schema increased psychopathy, which then directly increased unrestricted sociosexual attitudes. These results support the theory that psychopathy is an adaptive trait meant to increase short-term mating opportunities.

We report successful diachronic replication of two major sets of prior findings in the social biogeography of human life history (LH) strategy: (1) the constructive replication of the diachronic changes in the latent hierarchical structure of intelligence in Britannic populations, but as presently applied to the latent hierarchical structure of human LH strategy, now cross-validated in both Britannic and Gallic populations; and (2) the diachronic replication in both Britannic and Gallic populations of the structural relations found synchronically among human LH strategy, between-group competition, and economic productivity in cross-sectional data on contemporary samples of both national and subnational polities. In addition, a supplementary methodological objective was: (3) the convergent validation of diachronic lexicographic measures of LH strategy with respect to more traditional non-lexicographic indicators of LH strategy, such as infant mortality rates, total fertility rates, and life expectancies. We obtained complete configural invariance across Britannic and Gallic biocultural groups, meaning that the same model predictors were statistically significant, but incomplete metric invariance, meaning that most but not all model parameter estimates were statistically equivalent in magnitude and direction. All new results obtained from diachronic data in Britannic populations were replicated almost perfectly in Gallic populations.

Previous studies have examined what some of the economic correlates of life history strategies are at the population level, however economic diversity is an unexplored phenomenon in this literature. It is unknown whether diversity in production and economic output is directly fostered by life history speed, or only indirectly through the effect of phenotypic diversification of slow life history populations. Here we provide the conceptual and mathematical definitions for strategic and cognitive differentiation effects as forms of phenotypic diversity in life history and intelligence, as well as the estimation of macroeconomic indices (Krugman Dissimilarity Index, GDP Dissimilarity Index, and Shannon-Weaver Diversity Index) to track population-level macroeconomic diversity in subnational populations of Italy, Spain and Mexico. We examine the structural relations among phenotypic diversity and these three macroeconomic indices, and investigate if there exist residual direct effects of climate, parasite burden, population density, life history strategy, social stratification, and sexual differentiation upon phenotypic and economic diversity measures. Results suggest that economic diversity can be largely explained by phenotypic diversity, which in turn is influenced by both egalitarianism and slow life history speed, giving support to the notion that these are complementary rather than exclusive drivers of diversity.

Theoretical and empirical work in the study of life history evolution has largely shifted away from density-dependent models since the 1980s, focusing on alternative causative processes such as the prominence of extrinsic morbidity and mortality. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that density dependent models are integral, even if clearly not sufficient, to account for trajectories of life history evolution. However, little investigation has been conducted among human populations to compare these models. Here we collate data for subnational regions of Italy, Spain, and Mexico to directly compare alternative models of life history evolution, including information on several dimensions of climate, parasite burden, population density, and manifest indicators of life history strategy. We examine direct and indirect effects of potential predictors upon life history speed, and address the hierarchical relations among these variables in relation to the goal of theory integration. Results revealed that ecological indicators had no significant impact on population density. Population density and the brumal factor (a composite denoting higher altitude, latitude and colder mean temperatures) predicted slower life histories, however parasite burden (a measure of morbidity and mortality) failed to exhibit a direct effect upon life history speed. The impact of ecological factors was stronger for Italy and Spain, in comparison to Mexico. We discuss the implications for life history theory.

Causative processes behind variability in social and sexual equality appear to include resource availability and competition, variables that are also evidenced to drive life history evolution. Here we review social and sexual equality in terms of their relevance as social sequelae of life history strategies, and thus as integral to understanding the sociodemographic differences among human populations. We focus on two multivariate latent constructs: sexual inequality and economic inequality. The theoretical rationale for these constructs is provided, and the indicators for each are introduced. Our results, based on data for subnational regions of Italy, Spain and Mexico, indicate that egalitarianism is predicted by slower life history strategies, with residual direct effects of climatic variables also found to select for slower life histories. We discuss the implications of these findings to an understanding of human social biogeography.

We summarize and integrate the results of the sequential canonical cascade model that explores the structural relations among the various latent constructs we have operationalized, including climate, parasite burden, population density, life history strategy, social stratification, sexual differentiation, strategic and cognitive differentiation effects, macroeconomic specialization and diversification, human capital, and general cognitive ability.

Nothing is presently known about the relationship between individual differences in fertility and life history (LH) speed, as measured by the K-Factor. To examine this relationship, the correlation ...

Research has indicated two dimensions of attachment, Avoidance and Anxiety. We show that Avoidance is better conceptualized as Nurturance/Love within an evolved systems perspective on personality, and that the Anxiety dimension in infancy measures trust in the face of threat based on experience. These two dimensions have important differences, including different evolutionary functions and phylogeny, as well as different emotions, brain mechanisms, and patterns of sex differences and heritability. We used two versions of the Experiences in Close Relationships Survey yielding measures of Anxiety and Avoidance, and the Interpersonal Adjective Scale-Revised-Big 5, the latter chosen because it measures Nurturance/Love in a manner consistent with an evolutionary perspective on close relationships. 635 subjects participated in the study. Results supported the hypotheses of a strong negative association between Nurturance/Love and Avoidance as measured by the ECR and no association between Nurturance/Love and Anxiety as measured by the ECR.

Building on evolutionary models of personality proposed in the first edition of the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, this chapter considers the evolutionary significance of a relatively new higher-order personality construct, the so-called general factor of personality (GFP). The history of the construct is reviewed, along with a large portion of the recent theoretical literature addressing the existence and nature of the GFP and the empirical literaturerelevant to that. Finally, a review and evaluation is conducted of various recent attempts to develop and test a hierarchical Keywords: general factor of personality; life history theory; strategic differention-integration effort; hierarchical latent structure; Brunswik symmetry

This paper examines the degree of similarity in assortative pairing for life history strategy, mate value, delinquency, and sensational interests for same-sex friends compared to opposite-sex romantic partners in persons across a variety of nations that are culturally quite different, in spite of some sharing the same language. Specifically, we sampled participants from: (1) Tucson, Arizona, United States of America; (2) Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico; (3) San Jose, Costa Rica; and (4) Leicester, England. Due to the structure of the data and the nature of our research questions, we used a relatively new statistical tool called the Continuous Parameter Estimation Model (CPEM; Gorsuch, 2005), in order to estimate and compare assortative pairing coefficients between the four cultures. In all four cross-cultural western cultures replications, the inter-rater reliabilities, perceived assortative pairing coefficients, and actual assortative pairing coefficients of all four traits were generally substantial in magnitude, positive, and statistically significant among pairs of social partners as well as pairs of romantic partners.

In his Atlas of World Cultures, George Murdock catalogues more than 1000 discreet populations of peoples that are too often amalgamated at the level of the nation-state. For each of these ethnically informed cultural populations, Murdock provides nearly fifty points of tabular ethnographic codes, including mating systems, kinship networks, levels of consanguinity, post-marriage living arrangements, type and intensity of agriculture, settlement patterns, and social fluidity, which are then combined with environmental statistics such as latitude, and primary and secondary climate classifications. This chapter asks and answers questions concerning Galton’s Problem, finding commonalities among contiguous cultures to extend, not simply from contiguity, but from shared selective pressures. Murdock’s cross-cultural classificatory variants therefore derive from ecologically driven evolution, as described in social biogeographical applications of life history theory.

Like Toynbee, William McNeill is a world historian, but one with a bent toward epidemiology. Most directly in his Plagues and Peoples, McNeill considers the role of disease-induced mortality, infection, and transmission alongside the more traditional historical topics of war and conquest. McNeill studied disease as a primary cause in its own right, rather than as incidental sequelae to climatological catastrophes, famine, war, or resource limitation. McNeill anticipates the emphasis placed by modern evolutionary life history theory upon regimes of extrinsic mortality as being the main drivers shaping life history evolution. After all, from its founding, life history has incorporated population density and mortality rates into its quantitative formulae and qualitative theory, making it an ideal framework from which to reconsider McNeill.

Bound together by virtue of their shared mission to explain human nature and society, the social sciences have unity of purpose even as they have no meta-theory; there exists no foundation from which variables can be connected, causally sequenced, or ultimately explained. By way of an overview in abstract, this first chapter introduces life history theory, the meta-theoretical pretentions of which are demonstrated during the remainder of the book by reading geographers, demographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists in life history evolutionary perspective. Thereafter, comes a survey of the anatomical structure common to the eighteen core chapters, which are divided into four parts, beginning with an overview and concluding with a theoretical proof. These core chapters are grouped into six sections, each ending with a meta-commentary.

With eminently unpropitious timing, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote of resource competition just as humans were bursting the bonds of organic economies. An Essay on the Principle of Population, in warning of the ills consequent to population density and resultant resource competition, may have, however, underappreciated its evolutionary effects. Although the significance of mortality regime has superseded its overall significance, population density, and the resource competition it brings, was the variable around which life history theory was originally constructed. With the coming of density and accompanying competition, life history theory explains how populations change and stratify as they vie to survive and reproduce. As herein argued, the slowing of life history is a consequence of population density that Malthus could not suspect, but might have appreciated.

Montesquieu incorporates what would now be understood as political science and ecology into his eighteenth-century sociological studies. He concluded that sociopolitical systems were outgrowths of ecological conditions, and so cannot be unthinkingly transplanted from locale to locale. Already extant, there are evolutionarily informed studies of Montesquieu’s thesis using variables such as group-mean intelligence, which validates the relation between ecology and the development of monarchies, republics, and despotisms. However, this fourteenth chapter shows that this is but a part of a larger process. Human populations respond to ecological conditions through changes in mean intelligence, but also through changes in other life history traits. Consequently, it is inter-population life history means that were obliquely observed by Montesquieu to give rise to sociopolitical differences.

Raymond Cattell distinguished crystallized intelligence, akin to stored knowledge, from fluid intelligence, akin to raw reasoning abilities. Likewise, he delineated personality into component parts. Though intelligence and personality each qualify as subdisciplines within psychology, both are subsumed, along with other traits, under the meta-theory of life history evolution. The relationship is profound, though not straightforward. As described in this chapter, both intelligence and personality vary along a life history continuum, such that, as life history slows, population mean intelligence increases, as do personality traits like risk aversion, conscientiousness, anxiety, and agreeableness. Nevertheless, this effect occurs on average, and there is strategic variation occurring, which obscures the relationship between population-mean intelligence, personality, and life history. Once understood, these relationships color and clarify Cattell’s life’s work.

Marvin Harris has taken the vagaries of culture and grounded them in ecology. From burning witches, to worshiping animals, to proscribing foods, Harris finds religious and cultural idiosyncrasies to proceed from ecological vagaries. More than this, Harris broaches social structure, demographic constraint, race, death, sex, and fertility, all of which are traced back to some knowable ecological determinant from which they probabilistically derive. Yet, like Keeley, Harris pointedly rejects sociobiological explanations. He believed evolutionary explanations of cultural differences to be impossible, insufficient, and unnecessary. As herein explained, these assumptions stem from a misunderstanding of how rapidly populations can evolve, unfamiliarity with life history theory and related sociobiological explanations that explain intraspecific diversity, and overconfidence in phenotypic plasticity and environmental explanation more generally.

This sequential canonical cascade model of social biogeography is an extension of an integrated model of human cognitive ecology (Cabeza de Baca and Figueredo Intelligence 47:63–71, 2014) that predicted state-level life his-tory and cognitive abilities in Mexico. We integrate such population-level factors by utilizing a sample of 66 recognized national polities for which sufficiently complete information was available on all the variables modeled. These national polities were limited to those found in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Americas and Australia were excluded to avoid sampling parts of the world that had recently undergone mas-sive colonizations by human and nonhuman animals and plants from other zoogeographic zones, which might have disrupted the evolutionarily expected relations between phys-ical, community, and social human ecologies. Data were obtained from national census databases and international or-ganizations, and only national polities with complete data were analyzed, meaning that no missing data were imputed based on values from nearby or otherwise similar polities. This integrated model of social biogeography proposes that abiotic climatic factors in the physical ecology as well as bi-otic factors in the community ecology produce variations in subsistence and natural resources that then impact biometric markers of life history, triggering changes in social equality, within-group and between-group peace, sexual equality, mac-roeconomic diversification, and human capital. These effects, in turn, ultimately produce changes in brain volume and ag-gregate cognitive abilities. The final equation in our cascade model explains 88 % of the variance in aggregate cognitive abilities by supplying more detailed information on socioecological conditions than previous work.

The purpose of the present study is to test an integrated model of human ecology, which takes into consideration variables and predictions derived from both life history and social privilege paradigms. Population-level statistics were collected from an assortment of Mexican national agencies on thirty-one Mexican States and the Federal District ( N = 32). The integrated model of human cognitive ecology specifically described how biodiversity impacts state-level life history strategies and cognitive abilities in Mexico. Results from the sequential canonical cascade analysis supported the three following hypotheses: (1) regional climatic factors affected regional life histories; (2) both regional life histories and climatic factors affected regional levels of human capital; and (3) both regional levels of human capital and regional climatic factors affected regional mean cognitive abilities. The integrated model of human cognitive ecology explained a preponderance of the pooled multivariate variance ( V = .66) in cognitive abilities. Implications and future directions within life history and intelligence research are discussed.

A growing body of empirical literature supports the validity of psychometric assessments of human life history strategies, but no comprehensive quantitative summaries have yet been published. We present a psychometric validation study of a 20-item Short-Form of the Arizona Life History Battery (ALHB), the Mini-K, using metaanalytic procedures to survey a multiplicity of published and unpublished studies on English-speaking North American college student samples. Correlations between the Mini-K with other measures of related constructs describe the dimensions of the

We present empirical tests of the stability of individual differences over the lifespan using a novel methodological technique to combine behavior-genetic data from twin dyads with longitudinal measures of life history-related traits (including health and personality) from non-twin samples. Using data from The Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Longitudinal Survey, we constructed a series of “hybrid” models that permitted the estimation of both temporal stability parameters and behavior-genetic variance components to determine the contributions of genetic and environmental influences on individual differences. Our results indicate that changes in a higher-order factor of life history strategy (Super-K, composed of the K-Factor, Covitality, and Personality) over the study period were very small in magnitude and that this temporal stability is under a considerable degree of shared genetic influence and a substantial degree of non-shared environmental influence, but a statistically non-significant degree of shared environmental influence. Implications and future directions are discussed. DOI:10.2458/azu_jmmss_v5i1_figueredo

The Strategic Differentiation-Integration Effort (SD-IE) hypothesis predicts regulation by life history speed (K) of the magnitudes of the correlations among its components, such that individuals with slower life history strategies exhibit life history traits that are less correlated with each other than individuals with faster life history strategies. This conative differentiation among high-K individuals is proposed to arise due to the elevated social competition in stable, predictable environments faced by these individuals and to facilitate mutualistic rather than antagonistic social interaction strategies via social-ecological nichesplitting and domain-specific resource allocation. We tested the predictions of SD-IE regarding relations among life history traits using the Continuous Parameter Estimation Method on data from two college student convenience samples, one all-female sample (N=382) and one mixed-sex sample (N=205), as well as two nationally-representative samples of the US population, the MIDUS (National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States, N=2080) and the NLSY (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, N=5082). The predicted SD-IE effects were statistically significant and in the expected negative direction among most indicators of the lower-order slow life history factors and among all indicators of the single higher-order slow life history Super-K factor.

Life history (LH) theory provides an evolutionary theoretical framework for understanding individual differences in maturation, mating, reproduction, parenting, and social interaction. However, the psychometric assessment of human life history has been largely limited to generalized self-reports. Using template matching, this article examines the relationship between personality differences associated with slow-life history (slow-LH) and social behavior in 3 archival datasets. Two of these datasets include direct observations of behavior in the laboratory, and the 3rd provides self-reports of behavior in real life situations experienced within the preceding 24 hr. The results paint a consistent picture of the slow-LH individual as engaging in numerous adaptive social behaviors. However, when "normativeness" (the tendency for most people to be normal in both the statistical and evaluative sense) is statistically removed from the LH scores, a slightly different picture emerges. Both slow-LH and fast-LH persons display a number of behaviors that may be either adaptive or maladaptive in different contexts. Specifically, slow-LH individuals tended to behave in a manner that was considerate, kind, hard-working, and reliable but also socially awkward, insecure, and overcontrolling. Fast-LH individuals came across as talkative, socially skilled, dominant, and charming but also unpredictable, hostile, manipulative, and impulsive. These results are consistent with the evolutionary interpretation of LH strategies as being adapted to systematically different environments rather than better or worse approaches to reproductive fitness overall.

The Cognitive Differentiation-Integration Effort (CD-IE) hypothesis predicts that the dimension of life history speed (K) regulates the strength of the correlation among cognitive abilities, such t ...

The present work examined predicted relations among Life History strategies, Executive Functions, socially antagonistic attitudes, socially antagonistic behaviors, and general intelligence. Life History (LH) theory predicts that Executive Functions and socially antagonistic attitudes and behaviors underpin an interrelated and coherent set of behavioral strategies (LH strategies) designed to enhance reproductive success. Specifically, LH theory predicts a positive relation between Executive Functioning and LH strategies; a negative relation between socially antagonistic attitudes and behaviors and LH strategies; and that Executive Functions mediate relations among LH strategies and socially antagonistic attitudes and behaviors. Results from a Structural Equation Model (SEM), based on self-reported Life History strategies, Executive Functioning, socially antagonistic attitudes and behaviors, and general intelligence support these predictions. The structure of the model suggests that Executive Functions serve a mediating role in the relations between LH strategy and social deviance.

The psychometric trait approach to human life history, based on common factor modeling, has recently come under some criticism for neglecting to inquire into the developmental progression that orients and executes human life history trajectories (Copping, Campbell, & Muncer, 2014). It was asserted that the psychometric approach wholly focuses on creating a higher-order latent factor of life history by subsuming individual differences with developmental and social experiences, ignoring ontogenetic progression. Implicit in the critique is the assumption that developmental perspectives and latent approaches are mutually exclusive and incompatible with each other. The response to this critique by Figueredo and colleagues (2015) proposed instead that developmental perspectives and latent trait approaches are both compatible and necessary to further research on human life history strategies. The current paper uses three independent cross-sectional samples to examine whether models of human life history are best informed by a developmental perspective, psychometric trait approach, or both. UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas (IIP)

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 parent- ing 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 conve- nience samples of Mexico, the United States, and Costa Rica. UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas (IIP)

We test a romantic couple’s shared Life History Strategy (LHS) as a primary predictor of romantic relationship satisfaction against competing theories. First, we demonstrated that, when compared against the couples’ shared level of supportive communication and the geographical distance separating the partners, the pure shared-partner LHS variance, rather than unique partner-specific variance, is the strongest predictor of relationship satisfaction. Then, we revised the measurement model and demonstrated that, when compared against the couple’s disassortative mating on LHS, a couple’s mean LHS was the sole predictor of relationship satisfaction, and also a strong predictor of the couple’s assortative mating on indicators of LHS. Thus, shared LHS seems to be the most critical predictor of relationship satisfaction when compared to supportive communication, geographical distance separating the partners, and the couple’s assortative mating on indicators of LHS.

Contains fulltext : 102958.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) In the present study, we tested whether the General Factor of Personality (GFP) is related to the level of parental support. The GFP is assumed to occupy the apex of the hierarchy of human personality structure and is believed to reflect a socially and sexually selected aggregate of behavioral characteristics that are generally valued as "desirable" in interpersonal relationships. The relationship between the GFP and parental support tested in this study is predicted by Life History Theory, a midlevel evolutionary account of systematic differences in evolved reproductive strategies. A total of 428 families with mother, father, and two children (range 14-16 years) participated. Parents filled out personality questionnaires (Big Five) and their level of parental support. The children also independently rated the amount of support they perceived from their parents. In the present sample, parents' GFPs were found to explain 33% of the variance in the Big Five. Moreover, the parents' GFPs showed significant relationships with the parents' self-rated parental support, but also with the child-rated parental support. The monoinformant (parents ratings) and multi-informant (parent and child ratings) data support the notion of a substantive GFP that is related to the investment of parents into their offspring. 10 p.

Genetic diversification of offspring represents a bet-hedging strategy that evolved as an adaptation to unpredictable environments. The benefits of sexual reproduction come with severe costs. For example, each offspring only carries half of each parent's genetic makeup through direct descent. The lower the reproductive rate, the more substantial the cost when considering the proportion of genes represented in subsequent generations. Positive assortative mating represents a conservative bet-hedging strategy that offsets some of these costs and preserves coadapted genomes in stable and predictable environments, whereas negative assortative mating serves the inverse function of genetic diversification in unstable and unpredictable environments.

Much previous theory and evidence in both social and evolutionary psychology has been equivocal and inconsistent regarding whether in-group altruism should predict out-group hostility, and whether this effect should be positive or negative in direction. A “slow” Life History (LH) strategy emphasizes both kin-selected altruism and reciprocal altruism as means of investing heavily in offspring, blood relatives, and mutualistic social relationships with both kith and kin. We therefore investigated whether a slow LH strategy, as a measurable individual-difference variable favoring in-group altruism (positive ethnocentrism), should predict out-group hostility (negative ethnocentrism), and what the direction of the hypothesized effect would be. We found that a multivariate latent variable representing slow LH strategy served as a protective factor against a latent variable representing Negative Ethnocentrism. These results were replicated in the United States of America and in the Republic of Costa Rica using Multisample Structural Equation Model with cross-sample equality constraints. UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas (IIP)

The present study tested whether a couple’s shared life history strategy predicts relationship satisfaction longitudinally and relationship dissolution. Through an integration of structural equation modeling and multilevel modeling, we found that a couple’s shared life history strategy: (1) directly predicted their average relationship satisfaction, (2) indirectly predicted the linear change in their relationship satisfaction, (3) indirectly predicted the variability about their average relationship satisfaction, and (4) directly, yet weakly, predicted their likelihood of experiencing relationship dissolution over a one-year period. Couples in a relationship with a slower average life history strategy were more likely to: (1) report higher average levels of relationship satisfaction, (2) have a positive trajectory of relationship satisfaction, (3) have less variability in relationship satisfaction, and (4) were less likely to experience relationship dissolution. This suggests that the influence of life history strategy decreases over the course of the relationship.

Recent adaptationist accounts of human mental and physical health have reinvigorated the debate over the evolution of human intelligence. In the tradition of strong inference the current study was developed to determine whether either Miller's (1998, 2000a) Fitness Indicator Theory or Rushton's (1985, 2000) Differential-K Theory better accounts for general intelligence ("g") in an undergraduate university population (N=192). Owing to the lengthy administration time of the test materials, a newly developed 18-item short form of the Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM-18; Sefcek, Miller, and Figueredo 2007) was used. A significant, positive relationship between K and F (r = .31, p.001) emerged. Contrary to predictions, no significant relationships were found between "g" and either K or F (r = -.09, por = .05 and r = .11, por = .05, respectively). Though generally contrary to both hypotheses, these results may be explained in relation to antagonistic pleiotropy and a potential failure to derive correct predictions for within-species comparisons directly from the results of between-species comparisons.

Life History (LH) theory describes the existence of individual differences in the optimal allocation of inherently limited bioenergetic and material resources towards different types of reproductive-enhancing activities. LH theory predicts that slow LH (“High-K”) individuals are biased toward allocating resources toward enhancing the phenotypic quality (e.g., physical and mental health) of oneself and one’s offspring. Sociometer theory suggests that self-esteem tracks an individual’s level of social acceptance and inclusion. We examined the hypothesis that slow LH strategy positively predicts a more positive Evaluative Self-Assessment due to enhanced phenotypic quality. Participants completed questionnaires measuring their Life History (LH) strategies and a variety of measures of Self-Assessment (perceived mate value, perceived mating success, social economic exchange, positive and negative adjectives, global self-esteem, and collective self-esteem). An Exploratory Factor Analysis indicated that the measures of Evaluative Self-Assessment were best represented as a single latent factor. Slow LH strategy correlated moderately and positively with this Evaluative Self-Assessment factor. This relationship was not accounted for by socially desirable responding (self-deceptive enhancement or impression-management), sex, or age of participants. Consistent with Sociometer theory, we suggest that slow LH strategists exhibit high perceived self-worth due to increased social prestige and, relatedly, enhanced phenotypic quality.

A secondary analysis was performed on preliminary data from an ongoing cross-cultural study on assortative pairing. Independently sampled pairs of opposite- sex romantic partners and of same-sex friends rated themselves and each other on Life History (LH) strategy and mate value. Data were collected in local bars, clubs, coffeehouses, and other public places from three different cultures: Tucson, Arizona; Hermosillo, Sonora; and San Jose, Costa Rica. The present analysis found that slow LH individuals assortatively pair with both sexual and social partners more strongly than fast LH individuals. We interpret this phenomenon as representing (1) an adaptation for preserving coadapted genomes in slow LH strategists to maintain high copying fidelity genetic replication while producing a lower number of offspring in stable, predictable, and controllable environments and (2) a bet-hedging adaptation in fast LH strategists, favoring the genetic diversification of a higher number of offspring in unstable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable environments.

Attachment style and communication style have been shown in previous research to predict relationship satisfaction. We hypothesized that the ultimate cause underlying the relationship among attachment style, communication style, and relationship satisfaction is Life History Strategy (LHS). Furthermore, we hypothesized that LHS would not only predict relationship satisfaction indirectly through a couple’s attachment style and communication style, but would also predict relationship satisfaction directly. Two structural equation models were constructed to model and test each of these hypotheses. The first showed that the indirect causal pathways from LHS to attachment style, attachment style to communication style, and communication style to relationship satisfaction predicted 16% of the variance in relationship satisfaction. The second added a causal pathway directly from LHS to relationship satisfaction which reduced the estimate for the influence of communication style on relationship satisfaction and increased the total variance predicted in relationship satisfaction to 60%. These results challenge the notion that it is primarily the communication between two romantic partners which influences their relationship outcome by proposing that their LHS may be influential: (1) indirectly through their attachment style and communication style; and (2) directly upon relationship satisfaction.

The present study evaluates three ultimate theories accounting for individual differences in sexually coercive tendencies: (1) Life History (LH) theory, (2) Competitively Disadvantaged Male theory, and (3) Sexual Coercion as a By-product theory. Three-hundred twenty-four college students completed questionnaires measuring LH strategy, perceived mate value, mating effort, short-term and long-term mating orientation, aggressive tendencies, psychopathy, and sexually coercive behavior. Eight tactical subscales extracted from the Sexual Acts and Perceptions Inventory converged upon one latent Sexual Coercion factor. The predictor variables clustered into a second Protective LH latent factor, which buffered Sexual Coercion. The Protective LH factor fully mediated the relation between sex and Sexual Coercion. Thus, the three evolutionary accounts of sexual coercion describe unique facets of a single LH trait rather than three dissociable alternatives. We discuss the conclusion that reproductive LH strategy partially underlies the variation in predisposition toward sexual coercion.

Individuals exhibit differences in their life history strategies along a continuum that ranges from fast (involving investments in immediate rewards) to slow (involving long-term relationships and investments). Components of life history have been demonstrated to be more strongly correlated in individuals with faster life histories, a phenomenon termed Strategic Differentiation–Integration Effort (SD–IE). Sexual strategies are an intrinsic component of life history, yet have not been examined for SD–IE effects. We tested SD–IE in one student and two general population samples from two countries, among sexual strategy traits and correlates (sociosexual orientation, attachment avoidance, attachment anxiety, three groups of postcoital emotions, mate value, and life history speed). Two latent factors were found to explain the overall associations among these variables. The associations between the two factors and among their respective manifest indicators within factor were stronger in individuals with less restricted sexual strategies and more negative emotionality in sexual relationships, traits which are indicative of overall faster life history, supporting SD–IE hypotheses. Sex differences were identified and accounted for by life history speed differences between men and women. Unifactorial and multifactorial views of human sexual strategies can be argued to be equally supported by data, depending on individual life history speed.