Evolutionary psychiatry

Depression is a serious and persistent psychiatric disorder that commonly first manifests during childhood. Depression that starts in childhood is increasing in frequency, likely due both to evolutionary trends and to increased recognition of the disorder. In this umbrella review, we systematically searched the extant literature for genetic, epigenetic, and neurobiological factors that contribute to a childhood onset of depression. We searched PubMed, EMBASE, OVID/PsychInfo, and Google Scholar with the following inclusion criteria: (1) systematic review or meta-analysis from a peer-reviewed journal; (2) inclusion of a measure assessing early age of onset of depression; and (3) assessment of neurobiological, genetic, environmental, and epigenetic predictors of early onset depression...

Ever since, people live in contact with nature and animals, even in relatively non-utilitarian ways. Erich Fromm and Edward Wilson termed this human universal "Biophilia". But why different species can live together in a social way, is explained by a "common social toolbox" of neural, psychological and physiologicalmechanisms, which evolved over phylogeny.Major components of this toolbox are found in the vertebrate brain, which evolved over the past 600 million years in a succession of key innovations and conservative preservation...

Human life history schedules vary, partly, because of adaptive, plastic responses to early-life conditions. Little is known about how prenatal conditions relate to puberty timing. We hypothesized that fetal exposure to adversity may induce an adaptive response in offspring maturational tempo. In a longitudinal study of 253 mother-child dyads followed for 15 years, we investigated if fetal exposure to maternal psychological distress related to children's adrenarche and gonadarche schedules, assessed by maternal and child report and by dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEA-S), testosterone, and estradiol levels...

PURPOSE: The importance of sociality in psychology and psychotherapy is quite undisputed; however, this construct risks being underestimated in psychiatric nosography. The aim of the review was to assess the relevance of sociality in DSM 5 criteria. METHOD: Sociality-laden criteria of 192 selected DSM categories have been identified through a textual grid. Second, the criteria have been classified into 6 categories, i.e., (1) Affiliation and Attachment (AA), (2) Social Communication (SC), (3) Perception and Understanding of Others (PUO), (4) Culture, (5) Clinical Significance Criterion (CSC) (6), and No Specific Construct (NSC)...

Human beings constantly narrate reality. They narrate themselves, to themselves and to others. They narrate each other and narrate humanity. They narrate the world and nature. They narrate meaning, the meaning of life and things. This article aims to explore this phenomenon of "narrating". Through a narrative review, we will attempt to gather elements of reflection on narrative, considered here as the ability to narrate, it means to represent oneself, to put meaning. Firstly, we will focus on how cognition, interpretation, and culture allow Homo Sapiens to narrate reality to himself...

Famine and starvation have punctuated the evolutionary past of the human species. As such, we have developed hormonal responses to undernutrition that minimize energy expenditure on processes that are not critical for the survival of the individual, such as reproduction. In this review, we discuss neuroendocrine adaptations to starvation including hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, growth hormone resistance, hypercortisolemia, and the downregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis. We review the time-course of these adaptations by describing studies involving the short-term fasting of healthy individuals as well as studies describing the hormonal changes in states of chronic undernutrition, using individuals with anorexia nervosa as a model of chronic starvation...

Evolutionary analyses suggest that the human social brain and sociality appeared together. The two fundamental tools that accelerated the concurrent emergence of the social brain and sociality include learning and plasticity. The prevailing core idea is that the primate brain and the cortex in particular became reorganised over the course of evolution to facilitate dynamic adaptation to ongoing changes in physical and social environments. Encouraged by computational or survival demands or even by instinctual drives for living in social groups, the brain eventually learned how to learn from social experience via its massive plastic capacity...

This editorial outlines the formation of a new special interest group (SIG) in evolution and psychiatry. The formative beginnings of the evolutionary psychiatry field and founding of the group in Ireland are presented, identifying central figures of the field and their contributions. Furthermore, key milestones and accomplishments are discussed with current and future directions. Additionally, foundational texts and seminal papers are included to guide the reader in their journey to discover more about evolution and psychiatry...

BACKGROUND: Considering an evolutionary perspective, psychiatric conditions present us with a paradox. How can the high prevalence of those conditions be explained, given the importance of genetic factors in many of them? Evolutionary principles predict that traits with an adverse effect on reproduction undergo negative selection. AIM: To try to formulate an answer to this paradox from the perspective of evolutionary psychiatry by integrating different disciplines...

There is growing interest in music-based therapies for mental/behavioural disorders. We begin by reviewing the evolutionary and cultural origins of music, proceeding then to discuss the principles of evolutionary psychiatry, itself a growing a field, and how it may apply to music. Finally we offer some implications for the role of music and music-based therapies in clinical practice.

Depression is often framed as a disease or dysfunctional syndrome, yet this framing has unintended negative consequences including increased stigma. Here, we consider an alternative messaging framework - that depression serves an adaptive function. We describe the historical development of popular messages about depression and draw from the fields of evolutionary psychiatry and social cognition to describe the alternative framework that depression is a "signal" that serves a purpose. We then present data from a pre-registered, online randomized-controlled study in which participants with self-reported depression histories viewed a series of videos that explained depression as a "disease like any other" with known biopsychosocial risk factors (BPS condition), or as a signal that serves an adaptive function (Signal condition)...

Most people accessing mental health services have adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and/or histories of complex trauma. In recognition of this, there are calls to move away from medical model approaches and move toward trauma-informed approaches which privilege the impact of life experience over underlying pathology in the etiology of emotional and psychological suffering. Trauma-informed approaches lack a biological narrative linking trauma and adversity to later suffering. In its absence, this suffering is diagnosed and treated as a mental illness...

Multiple randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials have shown that botulinum toxin A (BoNT/A), when injected into the frown musculature, is an antidepressant. This review outlines the conceptual narrative behind this treatment modality, starting with theory developed by Charles Darwin. We develop the concept of emotional proprioception and discuss how the muscles of facial expression play an important role in relaying valenced information to the brain's emotional neuroanatomical circuit. We review the role of facial frown musculature as the brain's barometer and transmitter of negatively valanced emotional information...

Unique large-scale cooperation and fairness norms are essential to human society, but the emergence of prosocial behaviors is elusive. The fact that heterogeneous social networks prevail raised a hypothesis that heterogeneous networks facilitate fairness and cooperation. However, the hypothesis has not been validated experimentally, and little is known about the evolutionary psychological basis of cooperation and fairness in human networks. Fortunately, research about oxytocin, a neuropeptide, may provide novel ideas for confirming the hypothesis...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Evolutionary biology provides a crucial foundation for medicine and behavioral science that has been missing from psychiatry. Its absence helps to explain slow progress; its advent promises major advances. Instead of offering a new kind of treatment, evolutionary psychiatry provides a scientific foundation useful for all kinds of treatment. It expands the search for causes from mechanistic explanations for disease in some individuals to evolutionary explanations for traits that make all members of a species vulnerable to disease...

BACKGROUND: Juvenile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (JNCL, CLN3) is a childhood-onset neurodegenerative disease with prominent symptoms comprising a pediatric dementia syndrome. As in adult dementia, behavioral symptoms like mood disturbances and anxiety are common. In contrast to in adult dementia, however, the anxious behavioral symptoms increase during the terminal phase of JNCL disease. In the present study, the current understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms of anxiety and anxious behavior in general is addressed as will a discussion of the mechanism of the anxious behavior seen in young JNCL patients...

IMPORTANCE: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is often accompanied by a history of high-risk sexual behavior and somatic comorbidities. Yet, these features are most often considered in isolation and little is known about their underlying developmental pathways. Life history theory, a leading framework in evolutionary developmental biology, can help make sense of the wide range of behaviors and health issues found in BPD. OBJECTIVE: To examine whether the emergence of BPD is associated with the prioritization of immediate reproductive goals over longer-term somatic maintenance goals, a life strategy that can be viewed as a developmental response to adverse early life experiences, providing rapid reproductive benefits despite costs to health and well-being...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The authors investigated the artistic characteristics of autistic savant artists, hypotheses on the proximate and ultimate causes of their emergence, recent psychological and other studies about them, and psychological and neuroaesthetic studies about non-savant autistic individuals. The artistic features of autistic savant artists were significantly similar to those of outsider artists. Furthermore, the authors investigated the explanatory power of the paradoxical functional facilitation theory, the superior visual perception hypothesis, the "Hmmmmm" hypothesis, and the Neanderthal theory of autism regarding the emergence of autistic savant artists...