Papers by Tomas Cabeza de Baca
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2021
Politics and the Life Sciences, 2020
Knowledge of evolutionary influences on patterns of human mating, social interactions, and differ... more Knowledge of evolutionary influences on patterns of human mating, social interactions, and differential health is increasing, yet these insights have rarely been applied to historical analyses of human population dynamics. The genetic and evolutionary forces behind biases in interethnic mating and in the health of individuals of different ethnic groups in Latin America and the Caribbean since the European colonization of America are still largely ignored. We discuss how historical and contemporary sociocultural interactions and practices are strongly influenced by population-level evolutionary forces. Specifically, we discuss the historical implications of functional (de facto) polygyny, sex-biased admixture, and assortative mating in Latin America. We propose that these three evolutionary mechanisms influenced mating patterns, shaping the genetic and cultural landscape across Latin America and the Caribbean. Further, we discuss how genetic differences between the original populatio...
Journal of Methods and Measurement in the Social Sciences, 2016
The psychometric trait approach to human life history, based on common factor modeling, has recen... more The psychometric trait approach to human life history, based on common factor modeling, has recently come under some criticism for neglecting to inquire into the developmental progression that orients and executes human life history trajectories (Copping, Campbell, & Muncer, 2014). It was asserted that the psychometric approach wholly focuses on creating a higher-order latent factor of life history by subsuming individual differences with developmental and social experiences, ignoring ontogenetic progression. Implicit in the critique is the assumption that developmental perspectives and latent approaches are mutually exclusive and incompatible with each other. The response to this critique by Figueredo and colleagues (2015) proposed instead that developmental perspectives and latent trait approaches are both compatible and necessary to further research on human life history strategies. The current paper uses three independent cross-sectional samples to examine whether models of hum...
Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2016
Nothing is presently known about the relationship between individual differences in fertility and... more Nothing is presently known about the relationship between individual differences in fertility and life history (LH) speed, as measured by the K-Factor. To examine this relationship, the correlation between LH speed and the number of children was examined in two, large samples (MIDUS II and the Swedish STAGE dataset). Their association was positive and statistically significant in both cross-national samples. The association was robust with respect to statistically controlling for participant age. Nested model comparison of a Model looking only at linear effects with a second Model incorporating a quadratic term did not improve model fit in any instance, suggesting directional selection for slower LH, The heritability of the indicators comprising the K-Factor positively moderated the strength of selection, while K-Factor loading weakly negatively moderated selection strength, suggesting that K-Factor variance, as a multivariate latent construct, is not the primary target of selection. These results are consistent with fertility intentions data indicating positive correlations between slower LH and desired numbers of children. In modern environments, higher mating effort does not appear to result in more offspring, likely because of strategic interference suppressing the fertility of those with fast LH, stemming from influences that may be either endogenous (i.e., contraceptive usage) or exogenous (i.e., the presence of laws, such as alimony) to the individual.
Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 2016
Epidemiologists and medical researchers often employ an allostatic load model that focuses on env... more Epidemiologists and medical researchers often employ an allostatic load model that focuses on environmental and lifestyle factors, together with biological vulnerabilities, to explain the deterioration of human physiological systems and chronic degenerative disease. Although this perspective has informed medicine and public health, it is agnostic toward the functional significance of pathophysiology and health deterioration. Drawing on Life History (LH) theory, the current paper reviews the literature on disadvantaged families to serve as a conceptual model of stress-health relationships in which the allocation of reproductive effort is instantiated in the LH strategies of individuals and reflects the bioenergetic and material resource tradeoffs. We propose that researchers interested in health disparities reframe chronic degenerative diseases as outcomes resulting from strategic calibration of physiological systems to best adapt, survive, and reproduce in response to demands of specific developmental contexts. These effects of adversity on later-age degenerative disease are mediated, in part, by socioemotional and cognitive mechanisms expressed in different life history strategies.
![Research paper thumbnail of Methodologically Sound: Evaluating the Psychometric Approach to the Assessment of Human Life History [Reply to ]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/106116220/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Evolutionary Psychology, 2015
Copping, Campbell, and Muncer (2014) have recently published an article critical of the psychomet... more Copping, Campbell, and Muncer (2014) have recently published an article critical of the psychometric approach to the assessment of life history (LH) strategy. Their purported goal was testing for the convergent validation and examining the psychometric structure of the High-K Strategy Scale (HKSS). As much of the literature on the psychometrics of human LH during the past decade or so has emanated from our research laboratory and those of close collaborators, we have prepared this detailed response. Our response is organized into four main sections: (1) A review of psychometric methods for the assessment of human LH strategy, expounding upon the essence of our approach; (2) our theoretical/conceptual concerns regarding the critique, addressing the broader issues raised by the critique regarding the latent and hierarchical structure of LH strategy; (3) our statistical/methodological concerns regarding the critique, examining the validity and persuasiveness of the empirical case made ...
Child & Youth Care Forum, 2014
Background Children and parents often rely on the support provided by non-parental adults such as... more Background Children and parents often rely on the support provided by non-parental adults such as extended family members. Expanding conceptualizations of social support beyond traditional nuclear family paradigms to include non-parental adults may be particularly relevant to identifying family strengths among economically disadvantaged and Latino families. Objective In the present study, we examine the extent to which child reports of parenting support provided by non-parental adults are linked to variations in mother-reported parenting efficacy and depressive symptoms, and whether these associations vary according to maternal marital status and Latino/Hispanic race/ethnicity. Methods The present study considers how child-reported social support specific to parenting is associated with maternal self-reported wellbeing among a community sample of 59 mothers and their 10-12 year-old children. Results Findings indicate that controlling for maternal perceptions of global socialemotional support, parenting support is inversely related to parenting efficacy among
Personality and Individual Differences, 2012
Despite widespread acceptance of natural selection in biology and the life sciences, social and d... more Despite widespread acceptance of natural selection in biology and the life sciences, social and developmental scientists have resisted incorporating evolutionary frameworks into research and teaching curricula. Charlesworth (1992) has argued that developmentalists avoid evolution because they perceive it as running contrary to meliorist attitudes that are predominate in the field. Other scholars have suggested that evolution is ignored by social scientists because of a lack of knowledge about the theory. In this study, we suggest that resistance among developmentalists toward evolution may occur due to individual differences in life history and personality traits. We examine the meliorist attitudes, life history and personality traits of faculty, graduate and undergraduates in family studies in human development and the effect these variables have on the acceptance and usage of evolutionary theory in academia. Results reveal that life history may contribute to more meliorism, increasing disuse of evolutionary theory due to affective reasons.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2013
Childrearing behaviors are often shaped by familial and cultural principles that function as guid... more Childrearing behaviors are often shaped by familial and cultural principles that function as guides for socialization goals and effective childrearing practices. For an increasing number of Latino families, the extended kin often acts as a source of childcare support. Due to a scarcity of research on the familial support configurations of Latin American families, the current study utilizes a cross-cultural retrospective approach to explore the associations between matrilineal/patrilineal kin and life history strategies in relation to childrearing. Applying a family system and life history framework, the present model tested 200 university students from Mexico and Costa Rica on measures of family emotional environment and traditional social values (e.g., familismo/simpatía and patriarchal values). Results found that childcare assistance from patrilineal and matrilineal kin was associated with positive family emotional environment, which weakly mediated the association between kin car...
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2016
The process of mediation is of critical importance to the social and behavioral sciences and to e... more The process of mediation is of critical importance to the social and behavioral sciences and to evolutionary social psychology in particular. As with the concept of evolutionary adaptation, however, one can argue that causal mediation is in need of explicit theoretical justification and empirical support. Mainstream evolutionary social psychology proposes, for example, that organisms are "adaptation executers", and not "fitness maximizers". The execution of adaptations is triggered by fitness-relevant ecological contingencies at both ultimate and proximate levels of analysis. This logic is essentially equivalent to what methodologists refer to as the process of mediation; the adaptations to be executed (or not, depending upon the prevailing environmental circumstances) causally mediate the effects of the ecological contingencies upon the fitness outcomes. Thus, the process of mediation can be generally conceptualized as a causal chain of events leading to a given outcome or set of outcomes. If a predictor variable operates through an intervening variable to affect a criterion variable, then mediation is said to exist. Nevertheless, it does not appear that some psychologists (particularly evolutionary-social psychologists) are sufficiently well-versed in the fundamental logic and quantitative methodology of establishing causal mediation to support such claims. In the current paper, we set out to review the ways researchers support their use of mediation statements and also propose critical considerations on this front. We start with more conventional methods for testing mediation, discuss variants of the conventional approach, discuss the limitations of such methods as we see them, and end with our preferred mediation approach.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 15295192 2012 680396, Apr 1, 2012
... DOI: 10.1080/15295192.2012.680396 Tomás Cabeza De Baca a * , Aurelio José Figueredo b ... Dal... more ... DOI: 10.1080/15295192.2012.680396 Tomás Cabeza De Baca a * , Aurelio José Figueredo b ... Daly, M. and Wilson, M. 1988. ... of depression, no experimental enhancement of parenting skills) showed the opposite pattern (Beaulieu & Bugental, 20083. Beaulieu, DA and Bugental ...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2015
Child & Youth Care Forum, 2014
Background Children and parents often rely on the support provided by non-parental adults such as... more Background Children and parents often rely on the support provided by non-parental adults such as extended family members. Expanding conceptualizations of social support beyond traditional nuclear family paradigms to include non-parental adults may be particularly relevant to identifying family strengths among economically disadvantaged and Latino families.
Intelligence, 2014
The purpose of the present study is to test an integrated model of human ecology, which takes int... more The purpose of the present study is to test an integrated model of human ecology, which takes into consideration variables and predictions derived from both life history and social privilege paradigms. Population-level statistics were collected from an assortment of Mexican national agencies on thirty-one Mexican States and the Federal District (N = 32). The integrated model of human cognitive ecology specifically described how biodiversity impacts state-level life history strategies and cognitive abilities in Mexico. Results from the sequential canonical cascade analysis supported the three following hypotheses: (1) regional climatic factors affected regional life histories; (2) both regional life histories and climatic factors affected regional levels of human capital; and (3) both regional levels of human capital and regional climatic factors affected regional mean cognitive abilities. The integrated model of human cognitive ecology explained a preponderance of the pooled multivariate variance (V = .66) in cognitive abilities. Implications and future directions within life history and intelligence research are discussed.
Personality and Individual Differences, 2013
This retrospective essay appraises J. Philippe Rushton's application of life history to understan... more This retrospective essay appraises J. Philippe Rushton's application of life history to understanding the covariation among human traits in light of subsequent developments in the measurement and latent structure of Human Life History, covitality, and personality. We conclude that Rushton should be recognized for having initiated a theoretically and empirically highly fertile paradigm in human individual differences research.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2013
Previous developmental research has found that children from households with high shared parentin... more Previous developmental research has found that children from households with high shared parenting, childrearing agreement, and equitable division of parental labor experience positive developmental and social outcomes; a major limitation of these studies is that shared parenting measures do not assess the amount of total parental effort the child receives, but instead partitioning the amount of effort between parents. Life History (LH) theory predicts that the total amount of parenting the child receives should produce a greater developmental impact on the future LH strategies of children than precisely how that parental effort was apportioned between mothers and fathers. This report presents a cross-cultural study using convenience samples of university students in Mexico, the United States, and Costa Rica, investigating the relationship of total as well as shared parental effort on family emotional climate and the LH strategy of the participants as young adults. The first study was performed exclusively in Mexico; results indicated that higher levels of shared parenting experienced as a child were associated with Family Emotional Climate also during childhood and with participant adult LH. The second study extended these findings; higher total parental effort predicted shared parenting effort, positive emotional climate, and slower offspring adult life history strategy in the three convenience samples of Mexico, the United States, and Costa Rica.
The theory of natural selection has been vital in unifying the biological sciences and their rese... more The theory of natural selection has been vital in unifying the biological sciences and their research with a single testable metatheory. Despite a plethora of research supporting natural selection, teaching the theory of evolution remains controversial in high schools and higher education . In this article, we sample the attitudes toward evolution of 170 faculty and graduate and undergraduate students in family studies and human development programs from across the United States to determine whether resistances toward evolution remain and to describe the correlates of these resistances. Results reveal that an individual's prosocial meliorist attitudes, religious ideation, and his or her reported interest in and knowledge of evolution all uniquely contribute to whether they report evolutionary theory as being applicable to their area of research interests. We discuss the relevance of including evolutionary theory within family studies and human development research programs and make suggestions for how to implement an evolutionary studies program ).
Childrearing behaviors are often shaped by familial and cultural principles that function as guid... more Childrearing behaviors are often shaped by familial and cultural principles that function as guides for socialization goals and effective childrearing practices. For an increasing number of Latino families, the extended kin often acts as a source of childcare support. Due to a scarcity of research on the familial support configurations of Latin American families, the current study utilizes a cross-cultural retrospective approach to explore the associations between matrilineal/ patrilineal kin and life history strategies in relation to childrearing. Applying a family system and life history framework, the present model tested 200 university students from Mexico and Costa Rica on measures of family emotional environment and traditional social values (e.g., familismo/simpatía and patriarchal values). Results found that childcare assistance from patrilineal and matrilineal kin was associated with positive family emotional environment, which weakly mediated the association between kin care and slow life history. Positive associations were also found between matrilineal kin childcare and traditional Latin social values. However, patriarchal values were only predicted by higher levels of patrilineal kin aid. The results are consistent with the general theoretical literature of life history theory and family systems theory, suggesting that high levels of childcare produce positively emotional family climates, which in turn perpetuate the development of prosocial individuals with slow life history strategies. Implications for further research are discussed.
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Papers by Tomas Cabeza de Baca