No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2023
The “fearful ape hypothesis” is interesting but is currently underspecified. We need more research on whether it is specific to fear, specific to humans (or even cooperative breeders in general), what is included in “fear,” and whether these patterns would indeed evolve despite arms races to extract help from audiences. Specifying these will result in a more testable hypothesis.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
Target article
The human fear paradox: Affective origins of cooperative care
Related commentaries (28)
A novel(ty) perspective of fear bias
Are we virtuously caring or just anxious?
Beyond the fearful ape hypothesis: Humans are also supplicating and appeasing apes
Conceptualization, context, and comparison are key to understanding the evolution of fear
Cooperative care as origins of the “happy ape”?
Cultural evolution needed to complete the Grossmann theory
Developmental and evolutionary models of social fear can address “the human fear paradox”
Fear can promote competition, defensive aggression, and dominance complementarity
Fear signals vulnerability and appeasement, not threat
Fearful apes or emotional cooperative breeders?
Fearful apes or nervous goats? Another look at functions of dispositions or traits
Fearful apes, happy apes: Is fearfulness associated with uniquely human cooperation?
Fearfulness: An important addition to the starter kit for distinctively human minds
Heightened fearfulness as a developmental adaptation
Heightened fearfulness in infants is not adaptive
Hominin life history, pathological complexity, and the evolution of anxiety
How “peer-fear” of others' evaluations can regulate young children's cooperation
Infants aren't biased toward fearful faces
Is there a human fear paradox? A more thorough use of comparative data to test the fearful ape hypothesis
More than fear: Contributions of biobehavioral synchrony and infants' reactivity to cooperative care
Social learning and the adaptiveness of expressing and perceiving fearfulness
The adaptiveness of fear (and other emotions) considered more broadly: Missed literature on the nature of emotions and its functions
The dark side of fear expression: Infant crying as a trigger for maladaptive parental responses
The human fear paradox turns out to be less paradoxical when global changes in human aggression and language evolution are considered
The power of the weak: When altruism is the equilibrium
The suffering ape hypothesis
Under greater cooperative care, childhood fear is more accommodated, but less warranted
We aren't especially fearful apes, and fearful apes aren't especially prosocial
Author response
Extending and refining the fearful ape hypothesis