Basic needs satisfaction and its relation to childhood experience

Abstract

Humanity's evolutionary inheritances include many things beyond genes, such as self-organization and a developmental system for raising the young (evolved developmental niche or evolved nest). We present an evolutionary understanding of human species-typical and atypical development and need provision, as well as adult outcomes in speciestypical contexts. Maslow noted that thwarting of basic needs fulfillment in early life has effects over the long term but he did not describe what a positive experience in early life looks like. We provide an evolutionary picture here. We describe the development of a retrospective basic needs fulfillment measure based on the Basic Needs Satisfaction Survey whose validation was described in Chapter 2. We tested the usefulness of basic needs history against an existing measure of evolved developmental niche history which were highly correlated in two studies. Hierarchical regression indicated that the measure Basic Needs History explained more of the variance than Evolved Developmental Niche History.