“Evolved health psychology; exploring the added value of an evolutionary perspective on health behavior”

People often engage knowingly and willingly in behaviours that negatively affect health. Understanding the psychology behind health behaviours is one of the main objectives for health psychologists. Understanding these psychological processes is a necessary condition for researchers’ ability to craft successful health behaviour interventions – and, in turn, understanding is built on a foundation of empirical tests of theory. Hence, one important goal for health psychology is to continuously improve, broaden, and solidify the theory-base used to understand health behaviours. The main focus of this dissertation is to explore whether – and, if so - how an evolutionary perspective can add to theory in health psychology. We do so by applying this perspective foremost to a specific health behaviour – screening for sexually-transmitted infections (STI).