INS
Intentional Stance
Class: I - Natural Selection
EPA Total Score: 70 /100
Heywood, L. L. (2011). Affective infrastructures: toward a cultural neuropsychology of sport. Frontiers in evolutionary neuroscience, 3.
Abstract: Recently there has been a turn toward considerations of embodiment, cognition, and context in sport studies. Many researchers have argued that the traditional focus on clinical psychology and performance enhancement within the discipline is incomplete, and now emphasize the importance of athletes’ social and familial contexts in a research paradigm that examines interconnections between movement, cognition, emotion, and the social and cultural context in which movement takes place. While it is important that the sport studies focus is being expanded to consider these interactions, I will argue that this model is still incomplete in that it is missing a fundamental variable – that of our evolutionary neurobiological roots. I will use the work of affective neuroscientists Jaak Panksepp and Stephen Porges to show that because sport so clearly activates neural systems that function at both proximate and ultimate levels of causation, it can be seen to serve fundamental needs for affective balance. A neurobiology of affect shows how the evolution of the mammalian autonomic nervous system has resulted in neurophysiological substrates for affective processes and stress responses, and has wide-ranging implications for sport studies in terms of suggesting what forms of coaching might be the most effective in what context. I propose the term cultural neuropsychology of sport as a descriptor for a model that examines the relationships between neurophysiological substrates and athletes’ social and familial contexts in terms of how these variables facilitate or fail to facilitate athletes’ neuroceptions of safety, which in turn have a direct impact on their performance. A cultural neuropsychological model of sport might thereby be seen to elaborate a relationship between proximate and ultimate mechanisms in concretely applied ways.
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Supporting Evidence
45/100
Submitted by DJGlass
40/100
Submitted by DJGlass
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any supporting Medical evidence for this EPA.
40/100
Submitted by DJGlass
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any supporting Cross-Cultural evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any supporting Genetic evidence for this EPA.
0/100
Submitted by DJGlass
35/100
Submitted by DJGlass
Supporting Evidence is evidence that suggests that this trait is an Evolved Psychological Adaptation (EPA) - i.e., that it has been shaped by natural selection to solve a particular adaptive problem.
Challenging Evidence
0/100
Submitted by DJGlass
0/100
Submitted by DJGlass
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Medical evidence for this EPA.
0/100
Submitted by DJGlass
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Cross-Cultural evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Genetic evidence for this EPA.
0/100
Submitted by DJGlass
0/100
Submitted by DJGlass
Challenging Evidence is evidence that suggests that this trait is not an EPA - e.g., that it is a product of cultural learning or genetic drift, or maybe it does not exist at all. However over each line of evidence for a description.