Evolutionary Psychopathology Quotes

“At a higher level of abstraction, the behavioral correlates of life history strategies can be framed within the five-factor model of personality. Among the Big Five, agreeableness and conscientiousness show the most consistent pattern of associations with slow traits such as restricted sociosexuality, long-term mating orientation, couple stability, secure attachment to parents in infancy and romantic partners in adulthood, reduced sex drive, low impulsivity, and risk aversion across domains. Conscientiousness and (to a smaller extent) agreeableness are also the most reliable personality predictors of physical health and longevity; the contribution of neuroticism is mixed and may depend on the specific facets considered. The life history correlates of neuroticism are much less straightforward; for example, high neuroticism tends to predict increased short-term mating in women but reduced short-term mating in men, with much cross-cultural variation. There is also evidence that slow life history–related traits can be associated with social anxiety and insecurity, which is consistent with a general profile of risk aversion and behavioral inhibition. As a first approximation, then, metatrait alpha can be treated as a broadband correlate of slow strategies, with the caveat that neuroticism may be elevated at both ends of the continuum.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Low self-esteem, a negative view of the world, and pessimistic expectations about the future constitute the -cognitive triad- of vulnerability to depression.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The development of cognition, motivation, and self-regulation does not end with adolescence; indeed, personality traits do not reach their maximum stability until the third or fourth decade of life. This suggests that life history strategies are partially open to revision for a large portion of the life course -possibly depending on factors such as success in mating and reproduction, major environmental fluctuations, or unexpected changes in health, wealth or status.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Women suffer higher rates of depression than men because their survival and reproduction depends more critically on the integrity of social networks (which provide help, protection, and resources). For this reason, they have a stronger evolved motivation to avoid social stressors, a lower tolerance for cues of social conflict, and more intense emotional responses when conflicts break out.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“An evolutionary perspective also contributes to explain the higher female prevalence of panic disorder and agoraphobia. On average, women are more physically vulnerable than men and less able to defend themselves against attacks. Accordingly, it is adaptive for them to be more sensitive to potential cues of vulnerability and entrapment, and display a lower threshold for the activation of escape behaviors.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“On average, women are more physically vulnerable than men and less able to defend themselves against attacks. Accordingly, it is adaptive for them to be more sensitive to potential cues of vulnerability and entrapment, and display a lower threshold for the activation of escape behaviors.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Beliefs about overimportance of thoughts and thought control are more frequent in highly religious people and mediate the observed association between religiosity and OCD. Thought-action fusion overlaps with magical thinking and is associated with religiosity, paranormal beliefs, and positive schizotypy. most likely, thought-action fusion plays a significant role in the etiology of autogenous obsessions.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“It is hard to overstate the biological significance of obsessions, compulsions and the psychological mechanisms that produce them. On the one hand, compulsions bear striking similarities to various repetitive, ritualized behaviors observed in other animals --including self-grooming, food inspection and washing, and checking for predators. On the other hand, cultural rituals --which also share several features with OCD symptoms-- perform a range of important functions in human societies, from group coordination in social and religious ceremonies to the transmission of knowledge between generations.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Evolutionary scholars have long stressed the adaptive role of aggressive and antisocial behavior as a high-risk strategy for social and mating competition. In evolutionary psychopathology, antisocial disorders are usually regarded as costly but potentially adaptive strategies rather than behavioral dysfunctions. Some authors have focused specifically on the evolution of psychopathy, and argued that this condition embodies a "cheater" social strategy designed to exploit other people's trust and cooperative behavior while avoiding reciprocation.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Many aspects of positive schizotypy -magical thinking, paranoid ideation, and the tendency to form novel and unusual ideas and express them in idiosyncratic ways- can contribute to a compelling leader personality, often with religious or messianic overtones.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“In the context of male provisioning and multigeneration resource transfers (both pre-existing features of the human adaptive complex), wealth accumulation becomes especially significant for men as an extended form of parental and/or nepotistic effort. For this reason, selection on behaviors favoring the acquisition of prestige and wealth through technical skills must have been significantly stronger in men than in women.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“All living organisms deal with the inescapable fact that energy and time are limited resources. Individuals must live within finite budgets -themselves earned through expenditures of time and energy- and can never spend more than they have available.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“While surviving is usually a condition for reproduction, the catchphrase -survival of the fittest- is somewhat misleading, as survival without reproduction is an evolutionary dead end.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Fear of heights begins to manifest as soon as infants start crawling; fears of animals and monsters first appear when toddlers begin to move around more freely and explore their environment. In middle childhood, children become more autonomous and start helping with adult tasks; this is when fears of accidents and injuries become more pronounced.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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 regulation of hunger and feeding. Both the frequency of bingeing and its heritability peak after ovulation, in tandem with rising progesterone levels.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“That depressed people sometimes commit suicide is viewed as the evolutionary cost that is required to keep the threat credible.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Evolutionary models of phobias share the assumption that evolution has equipped us with a predisposition to fear certain targets more than others. In modern conditions, this evolved repertoire creates a high potential for mismatch, focusing defensive systems on negligible threats while downplaying some real and potentially lethal dangers.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Fear of heights begins to menifest as soon as infants start crawling; fears of animals and monsters first appear when toddlers begin to move around more freely and explore their environment. In middle childhood, children become more autonomous and start helping with adult tasks; this is when fears of accidents and injuries become more pronounced.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“As children learn to cope effectively with various threats (and gain better coping skills as a result of physical and brain maturation), they gradually become less fearful and achieve a growing sense of mastery.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“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.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“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.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach