Browse 46 quotes about Evolutionary Psychiatry.
“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
“Treatment of eating disorders is improved by the recognition that strenuous dieting arouses famine protection mechanisms that are prone to initiate a positive feedback spiral.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“Eating disorders were not shaped by selection, but mechanisms that regulate eating during famines were. ADHD was not shaped by selection, but mechanisms that regulate attention were. Serious depression was not shaped by natural selection, but capacities for normal low and high mood were.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“Eating disorders are not caused by abnormal genes; they are caused by normal genes interacting with abnormal environments.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“Patients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are surrounded by excess food, but their bodies are aware only of starvation. Their behavior is appropriate for a situation in which getting just a few extra calories might make the difference between life and death.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“The starting point is recognizing that selection has shaped powerful mechanisms to protect against starvation. During a famine, those mechanisms motivate animals to get food -any food- eat it quickly, and eat more than usual, because food supplies are obviously erratic. The system also adjusts the body weight set point upward because extra fat stores are valuable when food sources are unreliable. And, as noted already, weight loss slows down metabolism, which is appropriate when a person is starving but the opposite of what is needed when trying to lose weight. Also, intermittent access to food signals unreliable access to food supplies, so it increases food intake and bingeing, even in rats.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“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
“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
“The belief that one is unattractive can be as intractable as the belief that one has an undiagnosed disease. It's often present in people who are, to other people's perceptions, very attractive indeed. However, once the belief in one's unattractiveness gets established it can be used to account for all manner of experiences, such as being rejected by a date. The normal trait related to this disorder is wanting to be attractive. In the usual range, this is almost certainly useful.”
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 defficient anxiety can take risks that bring benefits at the cost of damage and loss.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Nightmares concerning animals under the bed are very common and easy to interpret in an evolutionary context where there were many wild animals but no houses. When children begin social life in groups, fears of being rejected or abandoned emerge in a process that elaborates into the extraordinary richness and complexity of social life.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Mental disorders need evolutionary explanations, but viewing disorders as adaptations is a mistake. The correct objects of explanation are traits that leave all members of a species vulnerable to a disorder.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Criminalization and interdiction have filled prisons and corrupted governments in country after country. However, increasingly potent drugs that can be synthetized in any basement make controlling access increasingly impossible. Legalization seems like a good idea but causes more addiction. Our strongest defense is likely to be education, but scare stories make kids want to try drugs. Every child should learn that drugs take over the brain and turn some people into miserable zombies and that we have no way to tell who will get addicted the fastest. They should also learn that the high fades as addiction takes over.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“The trajectory is clear: our minds have always been vulnerable to capture by alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, coca, and opium, but problems with them have escalated as advances in chemistry, transportation, and technology have increased the diversity, purity, and availability of drugs. The mismatch was bad before; now it’s getting much worse.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry