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Marco del Giudice Biography

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“Starting from middle childhood, however, boys and girls begin to take part in different social worlds with specific sets of challenges; moreover, sex differences in muscle mass and strength, bone density, and adiposity become more pronounced, giving boys a definite advantage in dealing with physical danger.”

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“On average, women are more physically vulnerable than men and less able to defend themselves against attacks. Accordingly, it is adaptive for them to be more sensitive to potential cues of vulnerability and entrapment, and display a lower threshold for the activation of escape behaviors.”

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“An evolutionary perspective also contributes to explain the higher female prevalence of panic disorder and agoraphobia. On average, women are more physically vulnerable than men and less able to defend themselves against attacks. Accordingly, it is adaptive for them to be more sensitive to potential cues of vulnerability and entrapment, and display a lower threshold for the activation of escape behaviors.”

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“Women suffer higher rates of depression than men because their survival and reproduction depends more critically on the integrity of social networks (which provide help, protection, and resources). For this reason, they have a stronger evolved motivation to avoid social stressors, a lower tolerance for cues of social conflict, and more intense emotional responses when conflicts break out.”

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“Fear of heights begins to manifest as soon as infants start crawling; fears of animals and monsters first appear when toddlers begin to move around more freely and explore their environment. In middle childhood, children become more autonomous and start helping with adult tasks; this is when fears of accidents and injuries become more pronounced.”

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“Fear of heights begins to menifest as soon as infants start crawling; fears of animals and monsters first appear when toddlers begin to move around more freely and explore their environment. In middle childhood, children become more autonomous and start helping with adult tasks; this is when fears of accidents and injuries become more pronounced.”

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“Evolutionary models of phobias share the assumption that evolution has equipped us with a predisposition to fear certain targets more than others. In modern conditions, this evolved repertoire creates a high potential for mismatch, focusing defensive systems on negligible threats while downplaying some real and potentially lethal dangers.”

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“It is hard to overstate the biological significance of obsessions, compulsions and the psychological mechanisms that produce them. On the one hand, compulsions bear striking similarities to various repetitive, ritualized behaviors observed in other animals --including self-grooming, food inspection and washing, and checking for predators. On the other hand, cultural rituals --which also share several features with OCD symptoms-- perform a range of important functions in human societies, from group coordination in social and religious ceremonies to the transmission of knowledge between generations.”

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“Beliefs about overimportance of thoughts and thought control are more frequent in highly religious people and mediate the observed association between religiosity and OCD. Thought-action fusion overlaps with magical thinking and is associated with religiosity, paranormal beliefs, and positive schizotypy. most likely, thought-action fusion plays a significant role in the etiology of autogenous obsessions.”

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“The pubertal surge of sex hormones plays a major role in the onset of eating symptoms in females, as shown by the fact that the heritability of Eating Disorders increases sharply at mid-puberty in girls, but not in boys. In particular, binge eating is strongly modulated by the interaction of estrogens and progesterone acrosss the menstrual cycle, consistent with the role played by these hormones in the regulation of hunger and feeding. Both the frequency of bingeing and its heritability peak after ovulation, in tandem with rising progesterone levels.”

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“Evolutionary scholars have long stressed the adaptive role of aggressive and antisocial behavior as a high-risk strategy for social and mating competition. In evolutionary psychopathology, antisocial disorders are usually regarded as costly but potentially adaptive strategies rather than behavioral dysfunctions. Some authors have focused specifically on the evolution of psychopathy, and argued that this condition embodies a "cheater" social strategy designed to exploit other people's trust and cooperative behavior while avoiding reciprocation.”

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“The sexual competition model of eating disorders has two interlocking components. The first component is based on the universal male preference for a nubile -hourglass- body shape and the fact that women tend to accumulate body weight as they age, with the result that relative thinness is a reliable cue of youth and reproductive potential. The second component is specific to modern societies: as fertility declines and the age of reproduction shifts upward, women tend to retain an attractive nubile shape for longer, which increases the importance of thinness as an attractive display. At the same, a number of converging trends contribute to intensify real and perceived mating competition among women, especially for long-term partners. Specifically, socially imposed monogamy reduces the number of available men; urban living dramatically increases the number of potential desirable competitors; and the media paint a visual landscape full of unrealistically thin, attractive women. The net outcome of these social changes is a process of runaway sexual competition that leads to an exaggerated desire for thinness in girls and women. Ironically, the process is largely driven by female intrasexual competition rather than direct male choice, and the resulting -ideal body- may be too thin to be maximally attractive to men.”

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“Mortality in Eating Disorders is partly caused by the medical complications of starvation and bingeing-purging, but suicide risk is also elevated. Suicide accounts for about 20% of deaths in anorexic patients; unsurprisingly, the risk is higher in AN-Bingeing/Purging than in AN-Restricted.”

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“Disorders in the psychosis spectrum (schizophrenia spectrum disorder and dipolar disorder) have similar prevalance in males and females (with slightly higher male risk for schizophrenia), while men are more likely to be diagnosed with NPS (narcissistic personality disorder) than are women.”

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“Evolution in the cognitive niche has endowed our species with remarkable abilities such as language, abstract reasoning, and sophisticated mentalizing. These species-typical innovations have been accompanied by rapid changes in brain structure and functionality. While adaptations such as language are hugely beneficial, they are also likley to carry some costs. A number of authors have argued that vulnerability to psychosis is one of those costs -the price our species pays for its unique set of cognitive skills. From this perspective, there are no individual fitness benefits to psychosis proneness; vulnerability to schizophrenia and other psychoses is a general byproduct of our evolved design, and unfortunate combinations of genetic and environmental factors determine the onset of a full-fledged disorder in some individuals.”

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“Even properly functioning defenses are subject to activation errors, evolutionary/developmental mismatches and maladaptive learning; moreover, mechanisms that are initially functional may become damaged or dysregulated following periods of chronic hyperactivation. In other words, conditions that start as adaptive response may sometimes morph into dysfuntions along the way.”

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“Runaway competition for thinness generates an evolutionary mismatch, which drives up the risk of maladaptive eating symptons; in particular Abed suggested that AN arises as a direct consequence of competition for thiness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintaina nubile body shape.”

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“Androgens in Eating Disorders show an intriguing pattern: while anorexics tend to have low testosterone, there are indications that bulimia is associated with exposure to high levels of prenatal androgens. In addition, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOs, a condition caused by elevated androgens) has been associated with increased BN risk but decreased AN risk.”

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“Social anxiety plays an important role in status competition as a behavioral defense against rejection and defeat. Intense social anxiety is especially adaptive for subordinate or unattractive individuals who need to avoid further status losses. However, excessive or misplaced anxiety may interfere with the acquisition of status and mates, and potentially lead to self-reinforcing circles of low self-esteem.”

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“Ferguson and colleagues also reviewed that thin models in the media have comparatively small effects on body dissatisfaction, and mainly on women with preexisting weight concerns and/or high neuroticism. Instead, the largest and most consistent effects are those of mating competition in the peer network -that is, the number of attractive and available women in one's inmediate social environment (for example, friends and colleagues).”

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“The pubertal surge of sex hormones plays a major role in the onset of eating symptoms in females, as shown by the fact that the heritability of Eating Disorders increases sharply at mid-puberty in girls, but not in boys. In particular, binge eating is strongly modulated by the interaction of estrogens and progesterone acrosss the menstrual cycle, consistent with the role played by these hormones in the regulaion of hunger and feeding. Both the frequency of bingeing and its heritability peak after ovulation, in tandem with rising progesterone levels.”

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“A thinness ideal at the social and individual levels is not the only precondition for the bingeing-purging cycle: bingeing require easy access to large amounts of high-calorie food, and most purging methods are impractical without modern plumbing and sanitation.”

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“Food restriction does not necessarily lead to self-starvation; in fact, a common effect of sustained weight loss is a tendency to binge whenever food is available (typically with feelings of automaticity and loss of control). Common triggers for binges include tempting food and excessive hunger, but also interpersonal stressors and strong emotions. To compensate for impulsive overeating, some people start to adopt purging behaviors such as vomiting and laxative use. The combination of bingeing and purging may lead to the onset of a self-reinforcing cycle. Especially in the early stages of the cycle, bingeing and purging cause intense guilt, shame and anxiety. Those negative emotions may then trigger more binges or prompt renewed attempts to restrict food, which ultimately end up strengthening the cycle. Bingeing and purging can be rewarding on a number of levels. On the one hand, these symptoms relieve anxiety, boredom, emptiness, and other negative feelings; on the other hands, they prevent stressful interactions with other people (e.g. staying home from school or work to binge), attract attention from family and friends, and may provide a way to communicate one's ill-defined psychological distress in concrete terms. Over time, the behavioral sequence of bingeing and purging becomes more automatic and less emotionally intense, but also harder to interrupt.”

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“The self-starvation cycle has been documented across time and cultures, including non-Western ones. In modern Western societies, concerns with fat and thinness are the main reason for weight loss and probably explain the moderate rise of Anorexia Nervosa incidence across the second half of the 20th century. However, cases of self-starvation with spiritual and religious motivations have been common in Europe at least since the Middle Ages (and include several Catholic saints, most famously St. Catherine of Siena). In some Asian cultures, digestive discomfort is often cited as the initial reason for restricting food intake, but the resulting syndrome has essentially the same symptoms as anorexia in Western countries.”

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“While natural selection is expected -all else being equal- to weed out traits that have become detrimental to fitness, the process may often take a long time. This generates the potential for mismatch between and organism's adaptations and its present environment.”

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“The mechanisms that enable and govern our behavior today have been shaped by the ecology and behavior of our ancestors across countless generations; the mind/brain can then be studied as an evolved -computational organ-, or more precisely, a collection of specialized organs that perform various kinds of computations.”

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“Anxiously attached people find it very difficult to break up with their partners, and, when they do, they often leave open the option of getting back together. Accordingly, elevated anxiety does not predict relationship dissolution in longitudinal studies. While attachment anxiety causes tension between partners and lowers their romantic satisfaction, it also contributes to keep them together, thus acting as a stabilizing factor as fas as long-term investment is concerned. For this reason, a small to moderate amount of anxiety is probably not inconsistent with slow strategies, especially in women.”

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“On average, men are more unrestricted and show higher-risk and sensation seeking; they are also lower in agreeableness, honesty-humility, and disgust sensitivity, particularly in the sexual domain (in constrast, there are only minor sex differences in impulsivity and conscientiousness). The reason is that these traits are crucially involved in the mating-parenting tradeoff, and males tend to invest in mating effort more than females even net of individual differences in life history strategies.”

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“To the extent that psychological mechanisms rely on information acquired through learning, they are vulnerable to maladaptive outcomes owing to the intrinsic limitations of learning processes. Indeed, the massive capacity for individual and social learning required to exploit the cognitive niche may contribute to explain our species' seemingly unique vulnerability to mental disorders.”

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“The development of cognition, motivation, and self-regulation does not end with adolescence; indeed, personality traits do not reach their maximum stability until the third or fourth decade of life. This suggests that life history strategies are partially open to revision for a large portion of the life course -possibly depending on factors such as success in mating and reproduction, major environmental fluctuations, or unexpected changes in health, wealth or status.”

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“Evolutionary mismatch may occur when an evolved mechanism encounters a novel environmental context that falls outside of the range that was recently encountered over its evolutionary history (the EEA or environment of evolutionary adaptation). In the new context, a functional mechanism can give rise to maladaptive outcomes or even induce dysfunctions in other mechanisms.”

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“In modern societies, for example, the media expose people to a relentless stream of images of unrealistically attractive "competitors" -an artificial, evolutionarily novel kind of social stimulus. It has been hypothesized that such exposure hyperactivates the evolved mechanisms that regulate female competition for attractiveness and status, thus contributing to the rising incidence of eating disorders.”

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“For instance, people who form early representations of the world as dangerous or uncontrollable may become anxious and start avoiding situations that they perceive as threatening. Avoidance is usually an adaptive response to danger; in this case, however, it prevents anxious individuals from learning that the environment is actually safer than they believe, thus locking them in a state of exaggerated anxiety. Even if such catastrophic failures of learning mechanisms are statistically rare, they can be highly maladaptive for the individuals who experience them.”

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