“Girls raised in dangerous, stressed or abusive environments are more likely to have a range of mental health issues, are typically more avoidant or reactive and are less able subsequently to parent as successfully as might otherwise have been the case.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Certainly, language must have been present for all of the 'behavioural modernism' of the last 50,000 years, as many such behaviours involve the types of symbolism that require explanation and storytelling.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The epidemiological evidence for sexual dimorphism in humans is extensive. Sexual dimorphism in body composition is already evident in infancy: males tend to be heavier than females at birth and have longer bodies and larger head circumferences. By early adulthood, sexual dimorphism in fat distribution is highly evident.
These are the evolutionary roots of male sensitivity to visual cues of female physical attractiveness and also of women's motivation to display, preserve and improve their physical attractiveness and thus increase their perceived mate value. The extreme end of this adaptation gives rise to the risk of EDs in the modern environment.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“To understand mismatch, we should note that yhe human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“To understand mismatch, we should note that the human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“In place of a process that 'others' distressed people, we can look for ways to 'belong' them. For sure they do belong, and the belonging begins on a vast scale. As a regular human being, having inherited protections that kept every one of their ancestors alive at least long enough to start a family, the patient can consider themselves well equipped to handle, in their own time and in their own way, whatever lies ahead. They possess a genius for survival that has accumulated over countless generations; in this real sense, all of their fore -fathers and mothers- are on their side.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The Sexual Competition Hypothesis is based on the fact that throughout human evolutionary history the female shape has been a reliable indicator of the female's reproductive history and reproductive potential. The same is not true for men, where physical appearance, while relevant, is much less useful in assessing a man's reproductive potential. The visual signal for a female's peak reproductive potential in ancestral environments was the female's nubile shape, which was generally short-lived and declined with the repeated cycles of gestation and lactation.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“We know that chronic high stress levels contribute to mental and physical disorders in later life; however, this process does not necessarily inhibit reproduction, and thus the cycle is perpetuated unless the environment changes as natural selection does not select for happiness, but only for survival and reproduction.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Female reproductive life history is linked to cardiovascular, metabolic, inflammatory and endocrine alterations to physiology in ways that have not only short-term but also long-term and, in some cases, permanent effects.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The grief triggered by the loss of loved ones does not appear to be an adaptation produced by natural selection as it does not appear to increase an individual's fitness in any way -at least not in non-social species. Depression caused by loss is more likely to be a by-product of the ability to form long-term attachment relationships. Grief is the price we have to pay when the attachment relationship is finally broken. This assumption is supported by the fact that a person may also experience symptoms of depression as a result of the death of their beloved dog, horse or other pet. The stronger the attachment, the longer the symptoms of depression last. On the other hand, the knowledge of the pain caused by the loss of an important person or pet makes us take more care of the people or pets that are important to us.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“...there may be observable patterns at a macro level, individual suicides can be understood as outputs of a chaotic system, or mental accidents. They ought to be -predictable unpredictable-.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Suicides are the residue left after the human brain has done the best it can with the information to hand.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Evolution by natural selection tends generally to promote adaptations up to the edge of chaos -the boundary between order and disorder. Where all fitness-relevant regularities have been subsumed, what remains is noise, devoid of predictive utility.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“...the environment of evolutionary adaptedness is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of ancestral environments.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The first, pian, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Any animal aware that it could relieve its suffering by ending its own life would be expected to seize the opportunity. By this light, suicide can be understood as the default human response to intolerable distress.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Depression can also serve as a signal for the abandoner that the relationship was important to the abandoned person. It may arouse so much empathy in the abandoner that they return to the relationship.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The first, pain, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“In contemporary developed countries, loneliness has been described as an epidemic caused by the loss of traditional social connectivity and a reliance on technology. Therefore, it seems likely that the Alzheimer's disease risk factors of social isolation and loneliness were less prevalent in the past.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“We humans are complex creatures and we live multifaceted lives; there is rarely a single reason for any aspect of what we feel or for how we behave.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“In good times, when material resources are abundant and women have plentiful social support, maternal negativity has little place in the lives of women. However, in times of scarcity and/or when women are unsupported, negative feelings can emerge to color the emotional palette and behavior of mothers.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The standard model of schooling in which 20 or more young people of the same age are taught in classrooms for about 5 hours a day on most days of the year for 10 years certainly runs counter some of our evolved behavioral strategies.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“From the perspective of life history theory, a speeded-up metabolism, less trust, less relaxation and more suspicion and risk-taking might be adaptive for abusive homes or violent neighborhoods. In such environments there is little emotional security or expectation that things will work out well.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“It is also important to note that not all pathological presentations are caused by the environment. A child may have underlying difficulties such as intellectual disabilities or other neurodevelopmental disorders. On the other hand, just because a child has survived unscathed does not mean that the environment was benign. We know that some children are naturally less sensitive to environmental influences and as such are more resilient to harsh environments.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Humans can survive in a wide range of physical environments, from the Arctic to rainforests to the Sahara. They can also survive in a wide range of emotional environments, from loving to neglectful to violent ones.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Understanding the starvation protection response helps eating disorders patients understand why restrictive dieting doesn't work.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Everyone knows that the environments we created to satisfy our wishes for sweets, salt, fat and leisure have resulted in epidemics of chronic disease. Obesity and eating disorders are prime examples, but alcoholism and drug addiction are also made possible by ready access to substances and means of administration that have only recently become available. Lack of selection until recent times against these often fatal disorders is an essential part of any evolutionary explanation.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Kin selection shapes tendences to make sacrifices that benefit family members who share genes identical by descent. The costs of such sacrifices are highest and most satisfying for children and siblings, but problems experienced by extended family members can nonetheless cause great distress.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“An extraordinary proportion of life problems and resulting mental disorders arise from mating conflicts. Unrequited love, the pain of being rejected, the fear of being left, being stalked, being harassed, jealousy and being trapped in an abusive relationship are common precipitants of mental disorders.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“...social media now seem poised to harm our mental health as much as fast food harms our physical health. We can't resist its pull despite the anxiety, depression and feelings of social inadequacy that are aroused by unprecedented social comparisons.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“People with a great tendency to anxiety get protection at the expense of missed opportunities. People with deficient anxiety can take risks that bring benefits at the cost of damage and loss”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Anxiety and fear are emotions. Emotions exist only because they have given selective advantages. This makes it tempting to try to define different emotions in terms of their functions. Fear protects against present danger, anxiety against possible dangers. However, defining emotions in terms of their functions risks tacit creationism: the tendency to view bodies as if they are machines.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“...natural selection produces bodies and brains with assortments of adaptations shaped over thousands of generations to enhance reproductive success (fitness) but not necessarily well-being or happiness.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The scaling up of human social organization into mega-groups comprising millions (even hundreds of millions in modern nation states) would not have been possible without the human facility for culture acquisition and transmission on a massive scale.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The evolution of sexually selected traits can create particular kinds of vulnerabilities to mental disorders, which are often skewed in their sex ratios. Examples of mental disorders where sexual selection may play an important role include eating disorders, sexual dysfunction and schizophrenia.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The idea of mismatch is based on the fact that adaptations are shaped by selection within a given environment. If the environment changes rapidly and radically, some biological systems run the risk of becoming mismatched to the new environment. This is also referred to as -genome lag-.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Parental investment theory predicts that, on average, the sex that invests more in its offspring, including the size of gametes, gestation, lactation and child rearing, will be more selective when choosing a mate, and the less-investing sex will engage in more intra-sexual competition for access to mates.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“When an organism can react in a protective way for little cost but potentially huge benefit (e.g. avoiding death), the optimal system expresses many false alarms. Vomiting may only cost only a few hundred calories and a few minutes, whereas not vomiting risks death from poisoning.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The growth in hominin socialisation can be linked with the development of greater abilities of mentalising - the recursive understanding of another's intent.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The great questioner. the social animal, in a limitless world of mystery, intrigue and dangers. Why did the sun rise and fall and influence the growth of plants and food? What were the stars that moved silently through the sky and the planets that wandered between them? What had happened to our relatives who had died, or what would happen to our children in the future? What excitement and wonder when they met an outside group, tried to communicate and exchanged and bartered goods, hearing tales of other lands and frightening beasts.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“We are sole hominin survivors, but not the inevitable masters. Luck, as much as biology, might have been key to sapiens’ place in the world. Our existence as a species is due to a series of devastating, largely random catastrophes, each of which overhauled the planet and its ecosystems, providing new opportunities: from the meteorite impact that killed the dinosaurs but unleashed mammals through to climate change in Africa some 2 million years ago and the emergence of the great savannahs.”
“For most of human evolutionary history our species lived as hunter-gatherers; hence, much of our cognition and behavior is adapted to this way of life. Given the magnitude of the sociocultural, economic and lifestyle changes experienced by Homo Sapiens over the last 10,000 years, in particular the last several hundred years, aspects of human psychology may be maladapted to modern ways of life.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Thus, for our ancestors, social networks were a matter of life and death, group living was the norm and social isolation was rare, carrying fatal risks. In turn, psychological mechanisms promoting the maintenance of social relationships have been heavily favored by natural selection.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Such is the magnitude of our evolved psychological dependence on social interaction that, even when surrounded by individuals who have committed the most heinous crimes, solitary confinement for more than 15 days is considered psychological torture by the United Nations.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Emotions function as a behavioral motivation system; accordingly, our mood is heavily impacted by progress towards current goals rather than one's overall life situation.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Looking for the brain abnormalities causing mental disorders without understanding normal function is like looking for the heart abnormalities causing heart failure without knowing what the heart is for.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The sexual competition hypothesis suggests that women are vulnerable to eating disorders because modern media augment the natural motivation for having a desirable body in order to get better mates. This explains why so many women use extreme caloric restriction in intense efforts to be attractive, but it does not by itself explain anorexia nervosa and bulimia.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“An individual may feel guilty about the event(s) that triggered their depression. Feelings of guilt make one reflect upon how their actions led to that outcome and thus help minimise the likelihood of the same thing happening again. The greater the role oplayed by one's own actions in the situations that led to the event that triggered the depression, the greater the sense of guilt.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“An individual may feel guilty about the event(s) that triggered their depression. Feelings of guilt make one reflect upon how their actions led to that outcome and thus help minimize the likelihood of the same thing happening again. The greater the role played by one's own actions in the situations that led to the event that triggered the depression, the greater the sense of guilt.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Suicide can help pass on an individual's genes to the next generation in a situation where that individual is a burden to their close relatives and their own reproductive potential is weak. By taking their life, an individual may contribute to the reproductive success of their close relatives and thus to the proliferation of their own genes. In such a case, that individual's close relatives would have one mouth less to feed and no sick individual to look after. Indeed, several studies have shown that suicidal thoughts and suicides are more common in those who have poor chances of reproduction and who feel they are merely a burden to their loved ones.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health