ABSTRACT
Evolutionary theories attempt to understand the biology of human emotions and how humans’ emotional capacities evolved. Turner has proposed an evolutionary theory that explores the selection pressures that increased the ancestors of humans’ emotional repertoire and capacity. These pressures revolved around the need for the primate ancestors of humans to become more cohesively organized as they were forced to adapt to open-country niches on the African savanna. Turner lists six basic selection pressures for (a) mobilizing and controlling increased varieties of emotions to sustain more complex social relations; (b) attuning responses so that emotions could be read and used to forge more complex and subtle ties that could increase the flexibility of social organization; (c) sanctioning, particularly positive sanctions, that could arouse more positive affective states that would, in turn, bond individuals together in more cohesive groups; (d) moral coding in which sanctions are given their power in relation to emotionally-charged rules of conduct; (e) valuing of resources with emotional significance so that they can generate bond-forming exchange relations; and (f) decision making in which emotional valances define an increased array of options that expand the complexity and power of decisions made by individuals. These lines of selection made humans, Turner argues, the most emotional animals on earth; and these expanded emotional capacities are what give humans the ability to build more flexible and complex social structures and systems of cultural codes.
