#225 Daniel Sznycer: The Evolutionary Psychology of Emotions
Dr. Daniel Sznycer is Assistant Professor in Department of Psychology at the University of Montreal, Canada. He is an evolutionary social psychologist conducting research on emotion and cooperation. He has multiple lines of cross-cultural evidence on shame, pride, compassion, and envy, and their roles in altruism, cooperation, social exclusion, and conflict. He’s also working to map the system that regulates how much weight one individual places on the welfare of another. He conducts research on how these emotions and motivations regulate political and moral attitudes, and how they shape communication. The methods Dr. Sznycer uses include experimental economic games, decision-making tasks, priming methods, cross-cultural and ethnographic data collection, large-scale representative surveys, and anthropometry.
In this episode, we talk about the evolutionary psychology of emotions. First, Dr. Sznycer explains what are emotions from an evolutionary perspective, and how we can square off their universality with their cross-cultural variation. I also ask him if there’s a set of basic emotions. He then tells us about the common grammar of social valuation that virtually all human beings share.
Time Links:
What are emotions?
Accounting for both universality and variation in emotions
Is there a set of basic emotions?
A “common grammar of social valuation”
What came first in evolution – our emotions or our sociality?
Cross-cultural commonalities in social valuation
Does the subjective side of emotion (the feeling) matter?
Follow Dr. Sznycer’s work!
Follow Dr. Sznycer’s work:
Faculty Page: https://bit.ly/2Wd3k0P
Website: https://tinyurl.com/yyh96hzl
ResearchGate profile: https://tinyurl.com/yxdh32k2
Twitter handle: @dsznycer
Relevant papers:
Adaptationism Carves Emotions at Their Functional Joints: https://tinyurl.com/y6zyt6xt
Cross-Cultural Differences and Similarities in Proneness to Shame: An Adaptationist and Ecological Approach: https://tinyurl.com/y292f3z8
Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame: https://tinyurl.com/yy7vt9mm
Cross-cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride: https://tinyurl.com/y5vlxfpo
The emotion–valuation constellation: Multiple emotions are governed by a common grammar of social valuation: https://tinyurl.com/y62yomv3