Moving Beyond Self-Interest Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, and the Social Sciences

by Brown, Stephanie L.; Brown, R. Michael; Penner, Louis A.

• ISBN13: 9780195388107
• ISBN10: 0195388100
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-26
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Moving Beyond Self-Interest is an interdisciplinary volume that discusses cutting-edge developments in the science of caring for and helping others. In Part I, contributors raise foundational issues related to human caregiving. They present new theories and data to show how natural selection might have shaped a genuinely altruistic drive to benefit others, how this drive intersects with the attachment and caregiving systems, and how it emerges from a broader social engagement system made possible by symbiotic regulation of autonomic physiological states. In Part II, contributors propose a new neurophysiological model of the human caregiving system and present arguments and evidence to show how mammalian neural circuitry that supports parenting might be recruited to direct human cooperation and competition, human empathy, and parental and romantic love. Part III is devoted to the psychology of human caregiving. Some contributors in this section show how an evolutionary perspective helps us better understand parental investment in and empathic concern for children at risk for, or suffering from, various health, behavioral, and cognitive problems. Other contributors identify circumstances that differentially predict caregiver benefits and costs, and raise the question of whether extreme levels of compassion are actually pathological. The section concludes with a discussion of semantic and conceptual obstacles to the scientific investigation of caregiving. Part IV focuses on possible interfaces between new models of caregiving motivation and economics, political science, and social policy development. In this section, contributors show how the new theory and research discussed in this volume can inform our understanding of economic utility, policies for delivering social services (such as health care and education), and hypotheses concerning the origins and development of human society, including some of its more problematic features of nationalism, conflict, and war. The chapters in this volume help readers appreciate the human capacity for engaging in altruistic acts, on both a small and large scale.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. xxi
Introduction
Background and Historical Perspective	p. 3
Foundations of Caregiving
How Altruistic by Nature?	p. 25
Adult Attachment and Caregiving: Individual Differences in Providing a Safe Haven and Secure Base to Others	p. 39
Mechanisms, Mediators, and Adaptive Consequences of Caregiving	p. 53
The Neuroscience of Caregiving Motivation
The Human Caregiving System: A Neuroscience Model of Compassionate Motivation and Behavior	p. 75
Neural Circuits Regulating Maternal Behavior: Implications for Understanding the Neural Basis of Social Cooperation and Competition	p. 89
Neuroscience of Empathic Responding	p. 109
Parental and Romantic Attachment Systems: Neural Circuits, Genes, and Experiential Contributions to Interpersonal Engagement	p. 133
The Psychology of Caregiving Motivation
Parental Investment in Caregiving Relationships	p. 153
The Role of Empathic Emotions in Caregiving: Caring for Pediatric Cancer Patients	p. 166
The Costs and Benefits of Informal Caregiving	p. 178
Too Close for Comfort? Lessons from Excesses and Deficits of Compassion in Psychopathology	p. 199
Egosystem and Ecosystem: Motivational Perspectives on Caregiving	p. 211
Caregiving in Adult Close Relationships	p. 224
Implications for Economics, Political Science, and Social Policy
A New View of Utility: Maximizing "Optimal Investment"	p. 237
Bringing Neuroscience into Political Science: The Caregiving System and Human Sociopolitical Evolution	p. 246
Motivation and the Delivery of Social Services	p. 269
Epilogue	p. 281
Index	p. 283
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