The well-evolved life: Well-being, evolution and personhood: An annotated bibliography

Abstract

Advances in most areas of specialization within the broad discipline of psychology occur incrementally – sometimes in larger increments, sometimes in smaller increments. One often-noted disadvantage of such specialized research progress is that connections between different areas can be overlooked or neglected. Three areas within psychology that have been making rapid theoretical and empirical progress over the past few decades have been: (i) understandings of well-being; (ii) evolutionary and related biological approaches to human psychology; and, (iii) theories of the development of personhood (or the ‘self’). The aim of this annotated bibliography is to provide a ‘first cut’ at characterising this multiple interface. It cannot hope to be comprehensive and apologies are made in advance to any authors of work that might be omitted from this collection. In particular, the bibliography, with a few exceptions, is restricted to journal articles accessed via the targeted databases. The omission of many books and book chapters is a definite limitation of the bibliography. The assumption, however, was that most books in the area are based upon published articles. Also, in most cases, book or book chapter authors are themselves article authors. Should someone wish to pursue the work of particular authors featured in this bibliography they will be able to locate books, book chapters and other omitted reference material by those authors. The aim of this bibliography is to assist with rather than substitute for comprehensive literature searches. Many bibliographies are designed to provide useful source material for particular areas of research specialization or the development of particular theoretical frameworks (e.g., see Axelrod and D’Ambrosio’s (1994) “Annotated Bibliography on the Evolution of Cooperation” for an example of the latter). This bibliography differs from many others in that, as just noted, it seeks to target a set of interfaces between three distinct bodies of literature:  Human well-being;  Evolutionary (and related biological) perspectives on human behaviour;  Personhood (including the ‘self’). Each of these bodies of literature is extensive in its own right. Importantly, this bibliography does not aim to include all the literature in each area. Instead, its focus is on the overlap between these areas. As will be explained in the ‘Methods’ section, this has involved a necessarily subjective, but principled, process of selection of those published works (captured in the search process) that provide clear insight into the connections between two or more of these areas of research. Within those bounds, the selection process has been deliberately ‘permissive’. While major, well-cited works are included so too are some quite focused and specific studies. The selection criterion in this respect is a work’s ‘fit’ with the purpose of the bibliography, rather than its renown.