It is well known that group living poses certain challenges in that some individuals will be potentially threatening (eliciting either fight and flight or submissive responses), while others offer potential opportunities for reproduction, and forming cooperative, sharing alliances (requiring approach and display behaviour). The navigation of these challenges has led to the evolution of mechanisms for the estimation of threat versus opportunity (approach and avoidance). This chapter explores social anxiety in this evolutionary context. It highlights recent adaptations to social competition by which social rank and position are competed for with demonstrations of attractiveness (e.g., talent, physical beauty, humour, intelligence, personality, altruism). This is competition to be chosen by others for various roles (e.g., as friends, team mates, sexual partners, work employees). This chapter builds on earlier models of social anxiety which focused on impression management, and links them to evolutionary concepts of social status and desirability competition.

Objectives Cultivation of compassion is a useful way to treat mental problems, but some individuals show resistance. Fears of compassion can be an obstacle for clinicians when providing psychotherapy, and for clients when engaging in interpersonal relationships. Despite its importance, a Japanese version of fears of compassion scales (for others, from others, and for self) has not yet been developed. This study developed a Japanese version of the Fears of Compassion Scales and tested its reliability and validity. Design This study used a cross-sectional design, and a self-report procedure for collecting data. Methods A total of 485 students (121 males and 364 females) answered self-report questionnaires, including the draft Fears of Compassion Scales—Japanese version. Results There were distinctive factor structures for fear of compassion from others, and for self. The fear of compassion from others scale consisted of concern about compassion from others and avoidance of compassion from others. All scales had good internal consistency, test-retest reliability, face validity, and construct validity. Discrimination and difficulty were also calculated. Conclusions These results indicate that the Fears of Compassion Scales—Japanese version is a well-constructed and useful measure to assess fears of compassion and the existence of cultural differences in fears of compassion.

In a world of increasing conflicts, over a variety of resources, and with a need for humans to work together to solve common problems, the area of international negotiations is central to these endeavours. This chapter will argue that conflict and conflict resolution can be understood against an evolutionary framework which helps us understand why the human brain is capable of producing highly destructive and conflictual behaviours. This approach opens up new ways of considering the challenges that face international negotiators. This chapter will also argue that although our brain has many destructive potentials, it also has a capacity for altruism, cooperation and compassion. If we learn to cultivate our minds from these qualities, along with mindfulness, this may help negotiators find new ways of negotiating and working with their own complex psychologies.

Attachment with altruistic others requires the ability to appropriately process affiliative and kind facial cues. Yet there is no stimulus set available to investigate such processes. Here, we developed a stimulus set depicting compassionate and critical facial expressions, and validated its effectiveness using well-established visual-probe methodology. In Study 1, 62 participants rated photographs of actors displaying compassionate/kind and critical faces on strength of emotion type. This produced a new stimulus set based on N = 31 actors, whose facial expressions were reliably distinguished as compassionate, critical and neutral. In Study 2, 70 participants completed a visual-probe task measuring attentional orientation to critical and compassionate/kind faces. This revealed that participants lower in self-criticism demonstrated enhanced attention to compassionate/kind faces whereas those higher in self-criticism showed no bias. To sum, the new stimulus set produced interpretable findings using visual-probe methodology and is the first to include higher order, complex positive affect displays.