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Evolutionary Psychopathology takes steps toward a unified approach to psychopathology, using the concepts of life history theory ¿ a biological account of how individual differences in development, physiology and behavior arise from tradeoffs in survival and reproduction ¿ to build an integrative framework for mental disorders. This book reviews existing evolutionary models of specific conditions and connects them in a broader perspective, with the goal ofexplaining the large-scale patterns of risk and comorbidity that characterize psychopathology.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I - Foundations
- Chapter 1. Human Nature in a Nutshell
- Chapter 2. The Evolved Mind
- Chapter 3. Individual and Sex Differences
- Chapter 4. Life History Strategies
- PART II - A Unified Approach
- Chapter 5. Evolution and Mental Disorders
- Chapter 6. The Life History Framework and the FSD Model
- PART III - Common Mental Disorders
- Chapter 7. Antisocial and Conduct Disorders
- Chapter 8. The Schizophrenia Spectrum
- Chapter 9. The Bipolar Spectrum
- Chapter 10. The Autism Spectrum
- Chapter 11. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
- Chapter 12. Personality Disorders
- Chapter 13. Eating Disorders
- Chapter 14. Depression
- Chapter 15. Generalized Anxiety Disorder
- Chapter 16. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
- Chapter 17. Specific Phobias
- Chapter 18. Panic and Agoraphobia
- Chapter 19. Social Anxiety Disorder
- Chapter 20. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
- PART IV - Conclusion
- Chapter 21. A Look at the Future
About the author
Marco Del Giudice is a professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. His work explores a broad range of topics at the intersection of human behavior, evolution, and development. Specific research areas include stress neurobiology, developmental plasticity, sex differences in personality and social behavior, and evolutionary models of mental disorders.
Summary
Mental disorders arise from neural and psychological mechanisms that have been built and shaped by natural selection across our evolutionary history. Looking at psychopathology through the lens of evolution is the only way to understand the deeper nature of mental disorders and turn a mass of behavioral, genetic, and neurobiological findings into a coherent, theoretically grounded discipline. The rise of evolutionary psychopathology is part of an exciting scientific movement in psychology and medicine -- a movement that is fundamentally transforming the way we think about health and disease.
Evolutionary Psychopathology takes steps toward a unified approach to psychopathology, using the concepts of life history theory -- a biological account of how individual differences in development, physiology and behavior arise from tradeoffs in survival and reproduction -- to build an integrative framework for mental disorders. This book reviews existing evolutionary models of specific conditions and connects them in a broader perspective, with the goal of explaining the large-scale patterns of risk and comorbidity that characterize psychopathology. Using the life history framework allows for a seamless integration of mental disorders with normative individual differences in personality and cognition, and offers new conceptual tools for the analysis of developmental, genetic, and neurobiological data. The concepts presented in Evolutionary Psychopathology are used to derive a new taxonomy of mental disorders, the Fast-Slow-Defense (FSD) model. The FSD model is the first classification system explicitly based on evolutionary concepts, a biologically grounded alternative to transdiagnostic models. The book reviews a wide range of common mental disorders, discusses their classification in the FSD model, and identifies functional subtypes within existing diagnostic categories.
Additional text
Still divided between the biomedical model and the psychosocial perspective, psychiatry urgently needs new theoretical frameworks to regain scientific credibility. By integrating in a masterful manner data from epidemiology, developmental psychology, and neurobiology, Marco Del Giudice shows the potential of life history theory in improving our understanding of the origin of mental disorders. Evolutionary Psychopathology fills a void in psychopathology research and should be a mandatory addition to the reference libraries of evolutionary psychiatrists.
