Evolutionary Perspectives on Infancy

This unique volume is one of the first of its kind to examine infancy through an evolutionary lens, identifying infancy as a discrete stage during which particular types of adaptations arose as a consequence of certain environmental pressures. Infancy is a crucial time period in psychological development, and evolutionary psychologists are increasingly recognizing that natural selection has operated on all stages of development, not just adulthood. The volume addresses this crucial change in perspective by highlighting research across diverse disciplines including developmental psychology, evolutionary developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, nutrition, and primatology.. Readers will gain

I. Theoretical Underpinnings.- 1. Preface/Introduction: Infancy through the lens of evolutionary developmental psychology.- 2. Human evolution and the neotenous infant.- 3. Cultures of infancy (and EEA).- 4. Primate infants.- II. Brain and Cognitive Development.- 5. Core knowledge.- 6. Social cognition.- 7. Social/moral cognition in young infants.- 8. Infant brain development, plasticity, and recovery of function.- 9. Music and language acquisition.- III. Social/Emotional Development.- 10. Infant emotions.- 11. Jealousy and the Biobehavioral Shift: Why the Terrible Twos are Terrible.- 12. Maternal caregiving and mother-to-infant attachment: Adaptations to ancestral infants' three-year period of dependence on breast milk.- 13. Touch/skin-to-skin contact.- 14. Attachment.- 15. Father-infant attachment relationships.- IV. Life and Death.- 16. Prenatal effects (predictive adaptive responses).- 17. Human birth.- 18. Infanticide/abandonment.- 19. Infant mortality.- 20. Mortality in relation to nutrition.