Evolutionary Psychology

One of the most prominent parts of psychology as a science is that it has so many different approaches - each one aiming to explain human behaviour with its own unique principles. One of these approaches that I find particularly interesting is Evolutionary Theory. What makes this theory special is that it describes that aspects of the way we behave have been inherited through our ancestors, and that our minds - like any physical organ - have evolved along with our bodies.
Anyone who has a science GCSE will understand that our evolution is the result of the development of features that will best help us to survive in our environment and be able to pass on our genes through reproduction, otherwise known as: Natural Selection. Evolutionary psychologists argue that natural selection doesn't just demand certain physical characteristics, but certain types of behaviour as well.

Imagine you're an ancestor Homo-Sapien from prehistoric times, the world is a hostile place full of predators, and members of your own species who would compete with you to get what you need: shelter, food, water, and a mate with whom you can pass your genes on. These are the requirements for the survival of most mammalian species, and to access these resources at this time you don't just need to be strong, fast and agile; you need to think like a survivor.

When faced with predators in prehistoric times, a successful survivor would have needed a certain behavioural reaction to escape or overcome them. This would have included increased levels of energy, heart rate and breathing rate which are provided by a rise in adrenalin production controlled by the pituitary gland in the brain. It is this mental-chemical process that leads to the 'fight or flight' response (Cannon, 1927), and is known to be present in all humans to this day as a reaction to stress.

This is a clear example of a bodily process that affects behaviour in a way that natural selection would have demanded in our evolutionary 'youth' and yet is still influencing us in modern day. The strange thing is that we don't need this response as we did thousands of year ago; while an everyday stressor to our ancestors would have been a vicious predator, a stressor to the modern person is more commonly something as simple (and non-life-threatening) as being late to school or work. Present-day stressors definitely don't demand the 'fight-or-flight' response that humans have evolved to have, yet the response occurs anyway, triggered by a mental process we cannot control.

What's more is that the response has been found to be damaging to us; if we are under the effects of the condition it causes for too long and too often, our health is affected by 'exhaustion' which describes a link found between prolonged stress and heart disease, stomach ulcers, and arthritis (Selye 1936). Not to mention the suppression of the immune system it has been associated with (Kiecolt-Glaser et al. 1984, Cohen et al. 1993, Riley 1981) wherein it has been found that large amounts of time being affected by the response leads to a less efficient immune response to illness.

Whether or not we can truly prove our response to stress as a cause of illness is not certain. But the prevalence of anger-management groups and stress-regulating medication makes it evident that the innate response to stress we share is not beneficial.

What this all shows is that we as humans are still affected by mental processes that were evolved for a different purpose, and in this case the process has become maladaptive. The idea of mental characteristics being evolved, but not necessarily being adaptive or helpful, is agreed upon by most evolutionary psychologists who have named the condition: the 'Mismatch Hypothesis'. The mismatch hypothesis explains that the human mind has not evolved to keep up with the busy modern environment we have made for ourselves. As Konrad Lorenz wrote:

"...the rushed existence into which man has precipitated himself is a good example of an inexpedient development caused by competition,"

It is through claims like this that evolutionary psychologists can relate current problems to an out of date brain.

Overall, the main points of evolutionary psychology are that:

• The mind is a system that has evolved under natural selection to have certain characteristics.
• Because of our shared evolution as a species, these characteristics can be seen in all human minds.
• these features of the mind function to handle problems faced in prehistoric times (specifically the upper Pleistocene period between ten thousand and one million years ago).
• Because of the previous point, our minds aren't fully suited to modern-day environment
• These principles can be use to explain psychological problems both normal and abnormal by people in modern society. 

State Dependent Memory Study - Method

After finding all the sources I mentioned in my last post, I made my own investigation designed to test State-dependent memory as well as to assess the “arousal hypothesis” found by Levinger and Clark (1961). The method includes a few changes I made to their original investigation, and shall explain why they were made.

I sampled my participants through snowball sampling, so I asked those from whom I gained confidence to participate and through them found others who took part. This way I had willing participants who co-operated throughout the process. The 4 participants were male and female: two adults and two 16 year-olds. This way the results were comparable by both gender and age, thus increasing the conclusion’s confidence.

Each participant was given a word-association test, in which I read out a series of simple words and asked them to say what each word caused them to think of immediately. My independent variable was the emotional charge of the words; some of them had neutral meanings, such as door, carpet, or photo, whilst an equal amount was negatively charged, like anger, pain, or scream. I also introduced just as many positively charged words, like success, cheerful, and smile. For two of the tests, I asked participants to recall their exact initial associations as the same list of words is read out again; while the other two participants were given the recall test a week later.

The dependent variable was how long it took for each participant to recall the way they had associated each word in the first test. I measured this by recording the sessions and timing their answers. The time it took them to recall an association was compared to the emotional charge of the cue word, therefore deciding if there is a relationship between difficulty in retrieval and the emotional material being remembered (as theorised by McCormick & Mayer, 1991).

I included positively charged words, unlike the original study, to assess whether the cause of retrieval difficulty is simply that – when in a neutral state – people find it harder to recall emotional material, or that it’s the type of emotional meaning that the word has that affects recall of material. For example, if someone found it easier to recall negative associations than neutral ones it could be because they experienced negative arousal at the time of recollection. Therefore, by using this range of emotional arousal, I tested for a difference between the principals of state-dependent memory and Freud’s repression hypothesis (1901).

Also, in order to further assess the possible difference between state-dependent forgetting and motivated-forgetting, my decision to add a delay to one group of the participants mimics that of Parkin et al (1982). Like my investigation, their participants were asked to recall their associations seven days after the initial test to see if the findings of Levinger and Clark would be reversed, so with two groups under either condition, I was able to assess both studies.

State-dependent memory (continued)

In the last blog I outlined the idea of  emotional state-dependent memory and how our mood can affect how efficiently we recall information. I also discussed 'Motivate-forgetting theory' (Freud 1901) which states that memories can be made inaccessible to us by unconscious processes if they are surrounded by negative feelings. While it could be argued that this idea focuses more on the forgetting of highly stressful events than on everyday (but still negative) occurrences, Levinger and Clark (1961) decided to assess how this theory applied to remembering simple words.

They began with reading out a list of simple words and asking the participants to respond to each word with what exactly came into their minds. After it was read out, the list was repeated and the participants were asked to recall their original responses to each word. The list included words of both negative meaning (like 'fear,' 'quarrel,' 'angry') and more neutral words (like 'window,' 'cow,' and 'tree').

The emotionally charged words clearly had an effect as on average it took longer for participants to respond to negative words than to neutral ones (not to mention that the negative words caused higher galvanic skin responses, implying emotional stimulation). But since the study aimed to see the effects of emotion on memory, what's more interesting is that the participants had greater difficulty in remembering their associations to the negatively charged words than with the others, almost as if their negativity made them more difficult to remember.

According to Freud, the reason for this is that an 'unconscious' part of our mind purposefully makes memories with less positive content more difficult to recall. however, a later study by Eysenck & Wilson (1973) showed that if there is a delay of about 1 week between the associations being made and then being recalled, then people actually found it easier to recall the emotionally charged words. If it was really a case of repression, then the material would have remained inaccessible to the participants.

In spite of the conflicting indications of the studies, they both do show emotion, or simply emotional association, to have a effect on memory. And according to the overall theory of state-dependent memory, feeling a particular emotion can make it easier for us to recall similarly emotional material. So emotions can be seen as both a help and a hindrance when it comes to remembering things.

State-dependent memory

*Just in case it wasn't made clear in my introduction to the blog, every opinion I express about certain concepts and research are just current interpretations, I do not claim to be an expert and am entirely open to alternate ideas of others*

After applying to study psychology at A-level, the other applicants and I were given a 'Preliminary Assessment Task' to do which was simply a psychology research coursework for us to do over the summer.
At the time it was clear to me that the task had been made just to dissuade anyone who would have taken psychology because it had the reputation of 'an easy A-level,' since anyone of that attitude is unlikely to do coursework over an otherwise work-free summer. Regardless, I chose to treat it as though my entry into the A-level depended on its quality.
The task was to gather information and research on 'state dependent memory' and then design your own study method as if you were investigating it yourself. These are a few of the themes I came across:

Firstly, the idea of 'State-dependent memory' refers to an internal context, where the recalling of an event when we felt a certain way depends on the way we feel while we try to remember it. So memory of events is helped greatly by us feeling the same way at the point of recalling; for example if you want to recall an event when you were happy, it's suggested that it would be easier if you are feeling happy at the current time (McCormick & Mayer, 1991).

Another, more extreme example would be if a victim of a violent crime wished to remember details of the crime to aid police investigation, their memory would be more effective if they were in a similarly emotionally aroused state (Clark et al., 1987).

While I found this concept highly intriguing I couldn't help but be skeptical about the two examples above; personally, I'd say that when you are happy you tend to be more focused on the moment than the past (often, we tend to reflect more on past events when we are unhappy in our current situation), and focus is surely a big factor on the efficiency of our memory. Also, in the case of the victim's recall, if they were put under the amount of distress that a violent crime can provoke then it's quite probable that their recall ability would be fairly reduced. however, I feel that such a case could easily be evidenced either way - but investigating such a variable as extreme distress would have a lot of ethical difficulties involved.

The idea of our memory relying on emotion is not at all a new one; Freud's theory of motivated forgetting (1901) describes an unconscious cause of forgetting certain material. He believed that memories that are likely to cause a negative mood, such as anxiety or shame, are likely to be unconsciously repressed as a defense mechanism. This is most likely referring to very big events occurring in our past (mainly our childhood) that would require a long period of therapy to truly uncover - according to psycho-dynamic theory. So, like the ideas proposed above by Clark and McCormick & Mayer, this describes our internal emotions and bias to make certain memories inaccessible to us.

An Introduction to Nick Rowark's research blog

An Introduction,

Good day, world! I am a student currently studying Psychology A-level - among other subjects - at a sixth form college. And since Psychology is the subject I hold the most interest for, and is the one which I wish to continue to university and beyond with, this blog is going to be all about the external research I have done around the profound study that it is.
 What's more is that I will be adding my own interpretation of the data I find - since the subject is surrounded by and encourages alternate interpretations, evaluations, etc. - in order to both express and reflect on my discovery of the science's copious areas. 
To summarise, this blog will act to narrate the path from my interest to my enrichment yet continued curiosity around the study of Psychology.