Riadh Abed > Quotes

“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”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The epidemiological evidence for sexual dimorphism in humans is extensive. Sexual dimorphism in body composition is already evident in infancy: males tend to be heavier than females at birth and have longer bodies and larger head circumferences. By early adulthood, sexual dimorphism in fat distribution is highly evident.
These are the evolutionary roots of male sensitivity to visual cues of female physical attractiveness and also of women's motivation to display, preserve and improve their physical attractiveness and thus increase their perceived mate value. The extreme end of this adaptation gives rise to the risk of EDs in the modern environment.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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-.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Consider the least stable way to arrange an animal's body: it would be to stand it upright. To see the biomechanics of a human skeleton walk and run -to stand on one foot and not fall, as most humans can easily do- is to witness a marvel of motion and balance, as robot engineers are learning their cost.
Bipedalism was the enabler of subsequent brain growth.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Suicide can help pass on an individual's genes to the next generation in a situation where that individual is a burden to their close relatives and their own reproductive potential is weak. By taking their life, an individual may contribute to the reproductive success of their close relatives and thus to the proliferation of their own genes. In such a case, that individual's close relatives would have one mouth less to feed and no sick individual to look after. Indeed, several studies have shown that suicidal thoughts and suicides are more common in those who have poor chances of reproduction and who feel they are merely a burden to their loved ones.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Certainly, language must have been present for all of the 'behavioural modernism' of the last 50,000 years, as many such behaviours involve the types of symbolism that require explanation and storytelling.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed

“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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“In place of a process that 'others' distressed people, we can look for ways to 'belong' them. For sure they do belong, and the belonging begins on a vast scale. As a regular human being, having inherited protections that kept every one of their ancestors alive at least long enough to start a family, the patient can consider themselves well equipped to handle, in their own time and in their own way, whatever lies ahead. They possess a genius for survival that has accumulated over countless generations; in this real sense, all of their fore -fathers and mothers- are on their side.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health