“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
“Therapists have long known that may depressions go away only after a person finally gives up some long-sought goal and turns his or her energies in another direction.”
Source: Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
“Therapists have long known that many depressions go away only after a person finally gives up some long-sought goal and turns his or her energies in another direction.”
Source: Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
“People are not controlled by some internal calculator that crudely motivates them to maximize their reproductive success. Instead, people form deep, lifelong emotional attachments and experience loves and hates that shape their lives. They have religious beliefs that guide their behavior, and they have idiosyncratic goals and ambitions. They have networks of friends and relatives.”
Source: Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
“...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