Browse 435 quotes about Evolutionary Psychology.
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“Evolutionary and neurobiological models of personality converge on the idea that neuroticism reflects heightened sensitivity of defensive psychological mechanisms designed to deal with multiple types of social and nonsocial threats.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“...by increasing the rate of fission in human groups, schizotypy may have acted as a promoter and accelerator of group selection.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“A better understanding of eating disorders and their symptons can be gained by considering the nature of two self-reinforcing cycles that may be labeled the self-starvation and bingeing-purging cycle.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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).”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“In humans, security motivation often involves heightened perceptions of responsibility, and failing to avert a preventable threat may lead to painful feelings of guilt.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“...disgust in our species is deeply connected to morality: violations of moral norms and taboos can elicit disgust and feelings of uncleanliness and contamination.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“Failures of the caregiving motivation can trigger powerful negative emotions, including sadness and guilt. Like attachment, caregiving is a vital component of close relationships between adults, particularly intimate friends and romantic partners.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“Pathogen disgust promotes physical avoidance, expulsion (e.g. vomiting), and cleaning behaviors. Disgust can also trigger activation of the security system; indeed, the two systems often work in synergy.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“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.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“The quest to trascend life's pains would become far more central to the religious experience as human societies expanded dramatically, beyond the small-scale kin communities of prehistory, with the advent of agriculture, the rise of state societies, and the coming of modernity.”
Source: Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars
“Intense religious experiences and crisis conversions seem to be a common response when the contradictions and tragedies of life create existencial threats.”
Source: How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures
“The proper place to start, in order to understand the various things called religion, is in the human capacity to entertain supernatural fantasy. This vast domain of cognition includes daydreaming, fiction, myth, dreams, all produced by what classical psychology would have called the faculty of imagination.”
Source: Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
“We have different sets of intuitive principles for man-made objects and natural beings, because we are toolmakers and must understand the connection between the shape of objects and their functions. We have social expectations because we need social support. As we shall see, we have moral intuitions because we depend on fair exchange to prosper. In each case, having these cognitive dispositions made our ancestors more successful than others at reproduction, which is precisely why they turned out to be our ancestors.”
Source: Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
“The ability of humans to speak a modern language and the evolution of our ability to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thus appear to parallel each other.”
Source: Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion
“But wait - where did the gods come from 100,000 years ago? Early Homo Sapiens certainly had conversations with other early Homo Sapiens regarding what they thought of one another, and what they thought about a third early Homo Sapiens who had insulted them, and why they were no longer on speaking terms with the other person, ad finitum, just as happens today. But you cannot have such conversations about the gods or with the gods unless you have gods.”
Source: Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion
“In short, early Homo sapiens had adquired the cognitive ability to enter into a conversation with the gods, just as modern Homo sapiens does today.”
Source: Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion
“Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood.”
Source: The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology
“For the human mind in its polarity of the male and female modes of experience, in its passages from infancy to adulthood and old age, in its toughness and tenderness, and in its continuing dialogue with the world, is the ultimate mythogenetic zone -the creator and destroyer, the slave and yet the master, of all the gods.”
Source: The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology
“The journalistic cliché that this is the -information age- is misleading if it suggests that in the past, either recent or distant, we did not depend on information.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“Too much tension is a disease; but so is too little. There are certain occasions when we ought to be tense, when an excess of tranquility (and especially of tranquility imposed from the outside, by a chemical) is entirely inappropriate.”
Source: Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience
“Stress is a survival mechanism that serves an obvious evolutionary function. When we are anxious, our autonomic nervous system releases a cascade of chemicals (stress hormones), which give our body instructions on how to prepare to face danger. Our heart beats faster to pump more blood to the muscles, and our breathing becomes heavier to provide us with more oxygen. Muscles tense up to protect us from injury and to facilitate fighting or running. Sweating helps cool the body down. Our attention increases, and our reflexes become sharper, keeping us alert. Stress acts as motivation, helping us to focus on our goals and rise to meet our challenges, whether those involve studying for an exam, flying a fighter jet or scoring that match-winning goal. In short, stress serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that beyond certain threshold stress ceases to be useful.”
Source: Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
“Evolutionary analyses suggest that stress is not what it used to be. For most of human history our ancestors lived in physical and social environment that were very different from what most of us experience today. Life in those environments imposed a set of selection pressures that shaped our species’ genome and behavior, leading to the evolution of anatomically modern humans. Although it is not entirely clear where exactly one should draw the line between them and more archaic forms, paleoanthropologists agree that by at least 50,000 years ago our ancestors were fully human.”
Source: Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
“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
“-- Myth #5: Monogamy Is Natural, Evolutionarily Determined, Optimal, or Divinely Ordained --
It may seem paradoxical to combine evolutionary psychology and religious beliefs in a single section, but these ideas have much in common. Both partake of a mindset that treats contemporary culture as an expression of eternal verities, neglecting the fact that societies vary a great deal, and that modern relationships have little in common with the majority of models that have existed throughout human history.”
Source: Designer Relationships: A Guide to Happy Monogamy, Positive Polyamory, and Optimistic Open Relationships
“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
“Systemizing and empathizing are wholly different kinds of processes. You use one process—empathizing—for making sense of an individual’s behavior, and you use the other—systemizing—for predicting almost everything else. To systemize you need detachment in order to monitor information and track which factors cause information to vary. To empathize you need some degree of attachment in order to recognize that you are interacting with a person, not an object, but a person with feelings, and whose feelings affect your own.”
Source: The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism
“She seems to always get it
To have become adept at empathy
Always giving excuses for people who’ve aggrieved her
To the point it’s hard for her to hit back when necessary
All because she assumes she ‘understands’
Then, one day . . .
She finally stands up for herself
At that moment, she revels in the natural instinct of self-preservation
She realises all this while the power she’s been withholding
In a transcendent moment of epiphany
It’s all beautiful ‘cause
Now, she can get back to empathy with understanding, rather, than without.”
“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