Psychology professors delve into death with latest work

What began in 2018 as a two-day, international interdisciplinary conference held at Oakland University and hosted by the Department of Psychology, has evolved into a new academic volume entitled, Evolutionary Perspectives on Death.

The book is co-edited by Todd K. Shackelford, Ph.D., distinguished professor and chair of Psychology and co-director of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at Oakland University and Virgil Zeigler-Hill, Ph.D., professor and director of graduate training for the Department of Psychology at Oakland University.

The book is published by Springer Nature and is part of the Springer Series on Evolutionary Psychology, the first series dedicated to this increasingly important discipline within psychology.

“This journey started in April 2018, when we welcomed dozens of scholars from North America, Europe, and Africa to join us for a conference titled Evolutionary Perspectives on Death,” explained Dr. Shackelford. “Those discussions, on a wide range of aspects of death and mortality from an evolutionary psychology perspective, led to this new volume. This book proudly showcases the groundbreaking empirical and theoretical work from several of those conference participants and other experts in the field.”

The Evolutionary Perspectives in Death book contains nine chapters addressing a wide range of academic perspectives by experts in the field. Those chapters include: The Role of Death in Life; Evolutionary Perspectives on the Loss of a Twin; Beyond the Search for Suigiston; Animacy and Mortality Salience; Nonhuman Primate Responses to Death; Did Human Reality Denial Breach the Evolutionary Psychological Barrier of Mortality Salience; Death in Literature; Last Moments of Witnessing and Representing the Death of Pets and The Evolution of American Perspectives Concerning Treatment of the Dead and the Role of Human Decomposition Facilities.

Oakland University President Ora Hirsch Pescovitz wrote the foreword for the book and said, “That conference truly represented a breakthrough forum at Oakland University. Expertly collected and edited by professor Shackelford and professor Zeigler-Hill, the new volume represents the scientific and intellectual richness that emerges when scholars employ an evolutionary perspective as the means to deepen their understanding of the role death plays in nearly every organism.”

Read more about the book at https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783030254650