The Evolutionary Psychology of Emotions w/ Daniel Sznycer

Hello, everybody! Today, I am releasing an interview with Dr. Daniel Sznycer. He 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.  

https://youtu.be/cEDkQX-8Brk

Link to podcast version (Anchor): http://bit.ly/2m29srq