Final answer:
The term most closely associated with evolutionary psychology is natural selection. This approach looks at how behavior and cognitive processes have evolved as adaptations to increase an individual's survival and reproductive success. It differs from related fields by focusing on psychological adaptations to ancestral environments.
Step-by-step explanation:
The term most closely associated with evolutionary psychology is D) Natural selection. Evolutionary psychology is the field of study that focuses on the ultimate biological causes of behavior and how universal patterns of behavior and cognitive processes have evolved over time due to natural selection. It examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. This approach posits that certain behaviors may have evolved as adaptations, presumably because they were beneficial in terms of survival and reproductive success.
Moreover, the founding figures in functional psychology, such as William James, directly incorporated Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection into their understanding of human behavior and cognition.
In contrast to other psychological theories, evolutionary psychology takes a gene-centered view of behavior and considers how an individual's inherited traits influence the likelihood of survival and reproduction, thereby affecting the frequency of those traits in the population over time. It also differs from sociobiology by focusing more on the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.