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Evolutionary Psychopathology Quotes

Browse 61 quotes about Evolutionary Psychopathology.

Evolutionary Psychopathology Quotes

“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.”

“The domestication of plants in the Neolithic Revolution with the move from hunting and gathering to farming led to large-scale cultivation of various plants and hence greater potential availability of plant toxins than could have been present in the wild.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Runaway competition for thinness generates an evolutionary mismatch, which drives up the risk of maladaptive eating symptoms; in particular Abed suggested that AN arises as a direct consequence of competition for thinness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintaina nubile body shape.”

“Runaway competition for thinness generates an evolutionary mismatch, which drives up the risk of maladaptive eating symptoms; in particular Abed suggested that AN arises as a direct consequence of competition for thinness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintain a nubile body shape.”

“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 thinness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintaina nubile body shape.”