Center for Evolutionary Psychology (CEP) is a research center co-founded and co-directed by John Tooby

John Tooby

John Tooby is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology....

 and Leda Cosmides

Leda Cosmides

Leda Cosmides, is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology....

 and is affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara

University of California, Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...

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The center is meant to provide research support and comprehensive training in the field of evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...

. The goals of the center are to facilitate the discovery of the adaptations that characterize the species-wide architecture of the human mind and brain and to explore how socio-cultural phenomena can be explained with reference to these adaptations.

The extramural board of the center are made up of Irven DeVore

Irven DeVore

Irven DeVore is an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, and Curator of Primatology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology...

, Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman is a psychologist who has been a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He has been considered one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century...

, Michael Gazzaniga

Michael Gazzaniga

Michael S. Gazzaniga is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. He is one of the leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, the study of the neural basis of mind...

, Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...

 and Roger Shepard

Roger Shepard

Roger Newland Shepard is a cognitive scientist and author of Toward a Universal Law of Generalization for Psychological Science. He is seen as a father of research on spatial relations....

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