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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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Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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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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Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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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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Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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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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Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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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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Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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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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Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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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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Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“Defensive mechanisms can make two symmetric kinds of mistakes: they can fail to activate in the presence of a threat (false negatives) or become activated when no threat is present (false positives). Even when defenses are functional and optimally calibrated, errors cannot be completely avoided; given the tradeoffs between the costs of different types of errors, the smoke detector principle suggests that defensive systems should typically evolve to commit more false positives than false negatives.”

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Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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