- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Philosophical issues
- Evolutionary psychology in the round
- The power of culture
- Evolution and psychology in philosophical perspective
- Niche construction, human behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology
- Group-level evolutionary processes
- The comparative approach
- Homologizing the mind
- Social knowledge in primates
- Social cognition in non-primates
- Culture in primates and other animals
- Empathy, sympathy, and prosocial preferences in primates
- Evolutionary neurobiology and cognition
- Evolution of the social brain as a distributed neural system
- The neuroevolutionary and neuroaffective psychobiology of the prosocial brain
- Neural pathways of social cognition
- Mirror neurons and social cognition
- Mechanisms of ecological rationality: heuristics and environments that make us smart
- Development
- The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism
- The ontogenetic origins of human cooperation
- Childhood experiences and reproductive strategies
- Parental impacts on development: How proximate factors mediate adaptive plans
- Evolution of stress response to social threat
- Birth order and sibling competition
- Mating, Reproduction and Life History
- Body Odours and Body Odour Preferences in Humans
- Reproductive strategies and tactics
- Symmetry, attractiveness and sexual selection
- Sex differences in aggression
- The evolutionary ecology of human family size
- Life-history theory, reproduction and longevity in humans
- Evolutionary psychology meets history: insights into human nature through family reconstitution studies
- Risk and decision-making
- The Self and the Social World
- Ecological and socio-cultural impacts on mating and marriage systems
- Kinship and descent
- Individual differences
- Human evolution and social cognition
- Temporal knowledge and autobiographical memory: an evolutionary perspective
- Shamans, yogins and indigenous psychologies
- Competitive altruism: a theory of reputation-based cooperation in groups
- Ethnic nepotism as heuristic: risky transactions and public altruism
- Cultural Evolution
- Dual-inheritance theory: the evolution of human cultural capacities and cultural evolution
- Modelling cultural evolution
- Evolutionary perspectives in archaeology: from culture history to cultural evolution
- Memes
- Explaining altruistic behaviour in humans
- The evolution of religion
- Evolutionary approaches to literature and drama
- Music and cognitive evolution
- The evolution of language
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article discusses two cognitive processes, empathising and systemising, in terms of sex differences and the implications of these for evolutionary psychology. It also discusses the theory that assortative mating of two strong systemisers is a cause of autism, a neurodevelopmental condition involving empathy impairment alongside hypersystemising. Empathising is the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. Empathy is a skill (or a set of skills). It defines mindreading as the ability to interpret one's own or another agent's actions as driven by mental states. The model in the article shows the ontogenesis of a theory of mind in the first four years of life, and justifies the existence of four components on the basis of developmental competence and neuropsychological dissociation.
Keywords: cognitive processes, evolutionary psychology, assortative mating, systemisers, autism, emotion, empathy, mindreading, ontogenesis, neuropsychological dissociation
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Autism Research Centre, Psychiatry Department, Cambridge University.
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- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Philosophical issues
- Evolutionary psychology in the round
- The power of culture
- Evolution and psychology in philosophical perspective
- Niche construction, human behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology
- Group-level evolutionary processes
- The comparative approach
- Homologizing the mind
- Social knowledge in primates
- Social cognition in non-primates
- Culture in primates and other animals
- Empathy, sympathy, and prosocial preferences in primates
- Evolutionary neurobiology and cognition
- Evolution of the social brain as a distributed neural system
- The neuroevolutionary and neuroaffective psychobiology of the prosocial brain
- Neural pathways of social cognition
- Mirror neurons and social cognition
- Mechanisms of ecological rationality: heuristics and environments that make us smart
- Development
- The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism
- The ontogenetic origins of human cooperation
- Childhood experiences and reproductive strategies
- Parental impacts on development: How proximate factors mediate adaptive plans
- Evolution of stress response to social threat
- Birth order and sibling competition
- Mating, Reproduction and Life History
- Body Odours and Body Odour Preferences in Humans
- Reproductive strategies and tactics
- Symmetry, attractiveness and sexual selection
- Sex differences in aggression
- The evolutionary ecology of human family size
- Life-history theory, reproduction and longevity in humans
- Evolutionary psychology meets history: insights into human nature through family reconstitution studies
- Risk and decision-making
- The Self and the Social World
- Ecological and socio-cultural impacts on mating and marriage systems
- Kinship and descent
- Individual differences
- Human evolution and social cognition
- Temporal knowledge and autobiographical memory: an evolutionary perspective
- Shamans, yogins and indigenous psychologies
- Competitive altruism: a theory of reputation-based cooperation in groups
- Ethnic nepotism as heuristic: risky transactions and public altruism
- Cultural Evolution
- Dual-inheritance theory: the evolution of human cultural capacities and cultural evolution
- Modelling cultural evolution
- Evolutionary perspectives in archaeology: from culture history to cultural evolution
- Memes
- Explaining altruistic behaviour in humans
- The evolution of religion
- Evolutionary approaches to literature and drama
- Music and cognitive evolution
- The evolution of language
- Index
