• Some of the challenges people face today,
• diverge quite a bit from those
• faced by their ancestors.
• Such divergences can ,- lead adaptive psychological mechanisms to “misfire”
• to respond in ways that might have been adaptive in the past,
• but that no longer produce adaptive consequences today.

• Psychological adaptations have been designed over thousands of generations of human evolution.
• The adaptations humans possess today, then,
• were designed to operate in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness,
• a composite of the social and physical challenges as they have existed for hundreds of thousands of years (Bowlby, 1969; Cosmides & Tooby, 1992).
• As such, they may or may not be well-adapted
• for life in contemporary society

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Safra, L., Chevallier, C., & Sijilmassi, A. (2021). Poverty and Threat Reactivity. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fp35r

Kubo, T., Sugawara, D., & Masuyama, A. (2020). The effect of ego-resiliency and COVID-19-related stress on mental health among the Japanese population. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/up6c3

Domínguez-Álvarez, B., López-Romero, L., Isdahl-Troye, A., Gómez-Fraguela, J. A., & Romero, E. (2020). Children Coping, Contextual Risk and their Interplay during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Spanish Case [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bt6kr

Dunn, C. G., Kenney, E., Fleischhacker, S. E., & Bleich, S. N. (2020). Feeding Low-Income Children during the Covid-19 Pandemic. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(18), e40. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2005638