Evolutionary Psychopathology Quotes

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― Marco del Giudice, 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.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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.”
― 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

“To understand mismatch, we should note that yhe human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“To understand mismatch, we should note that the human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”
― 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

“The Sexual Competition Hypothesis is based on the fact that throughout human evolutionary history the female shape has been a reliable indicator of the female's reproductive history and reproductive potential. The same is not true for men, where physical appearance, while relevant, is much less useful in assessing a man's reproductive potential. The visual signal for a female's peak reproductive potential in ancestral environments was the female's nubile shape, which was generally short-lived and declined with the repeated cycles of gestation and lactation.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

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

“Drug use has been found in all human societies throughout historical and prehistorical times, as well as being evident in closely related species. These observations warrant serious evolutionary exploration.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“We are no longer in that primitive state of mind. We have an expectation of survival and have conquered most of the obvious predators that plagued us day to day with our superlative contemplation skills born of language. We sit in our comfy heated houses while the snow flutters like butterflies around us and we bask in a feeling of general contentment.”
― Steven Lesk M.D., Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness

“But in the mood d1sorders, uni- and bipolar, we see a return to more primitive, primary process ruminating without the loss of adult cognitive rules. Major depression is a return to a primitive hibernation state without the wholesale collapse in logical processes that we see in schizophrenia. It shifts the usual thought pattern from secondary to primary process thinking, the embattled autopilot of the past six million years or so. If happiness is a modern invention, depressives return to the affective state of the hibernating cave dweller. Mania, on the other hand, is a desperate flight from dreaded depression and encapsulates the level of primitivity imposed by it.”
― Steven Lesk M.D., Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness