Evolutionary developmental psychology and socio-emotional development

Abstract

Evolutionary developmental psychology is relevant to understanding many aspects of socio-emotional development in infancy, childhood and adolescence. This article focuses on parental investment and paternity certainty, child abuse, grandparenting, and parent-offspring conflict; sibling relationships and theory of mind; children's peer groups, especially dominance, aggression, sex differences and pretend and rough-and-tumble play; and on a model linking early family experiences to peer behaviour, age of puberty and reproductive behaviour. The review illustrates some of the potential of evolutionary developmental psychology in providing a comprehensive framework for understanding many aspects of social behaviour, and of providing testable hypotheses. Evolutionary explanations should be seen as compatible with cultural and environmental explanations, that may provide the proximal mechanisms by which the more distal functions of these behaviours are typically realised in actual developmental process and experience