The evolutionary psychology of hunger.
An evolutionary psychological perspective suggests that emotions can be understood as coordinating mechanisms whose job is to regulate various psychological and physiological programs in the service of solving an adaptive problem. This paper suggests that it may also be fruitful to approach hunger from this coordinating mechanism perspective. To this end, I put forward an evolutionary task analysis of hunger, generating novel a priori hypotheses about the coordinating effects of hunger on psychological processes such as perception, attention, categorization, and memory. This approach appears empirically fruitful in that it yields a bounty of testable new hypotheses.
Department of Psychology, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey; College of Life Sciences, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), Germany. Electronic address: laith@bilkent.edu.tr.
Laith
L
Al-Shawaf
D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D005075:Biological Evolution; D004435:Eating / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D036262:Empirical Research; D006801:Humans; D006815:Hunger / Q000502:physiology*; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D009042:Motivation / Q000502:physiology; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology
Coordinating mechanisms; Eating; Evolutionary psychology; Hunger; Superordinate mechanisms