Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry
Review articleDarwinian models of depression: A review of evolutionary accounts of mood and mood disorders
Introduction
In the past, theoretical and empirical approaches to depression have been dominated by investigations targeting the symptomatology and treatment of severe, clinically-significant depressed states, and questions of etiology have been largely reserved for precipitants of immediate relevance to the depressed individual. While such proximate causes are undoubtedly of central importance to an understanding of depressive phenomena, more recently an expanding body of literature has focused on evolutionary, or functional, explanations. Arguably, Darwinian explanations of depression (e.g., Allen and Badcock, 2003, Bowlby, 1980, Gilbert, 1992, Nesse, 2000, Price et al., 1994, Watson and Andrews, 2002) are of practical and theoretical importance for three reasons. First, an understanding of the role of depressive phenomena in an evolutionary context provides insight into why people experience depression. If depressed states evolved in response to certain adaptive problems in our evolutionary history, they may be said to perform a particular adaptive function. By isolating that function, one stands to introduce a new tier of explanation — an understanding of depression rooted in the lives of our ancestors. Notably, such an approach is also likely to yield direct, practical implications with regards to treatment (Price et al., 1994, Watson and Andrews, 2002). Second, an evolutionary account of depression challenges the more traditional view that depressed states are intrinsically associated with dysfunction (Gilbert, 1998). If it can be shown that it played an adaptive role in our past, it follows that in some situations, depression provided reproductive benefits for the individual or their kin. Third, and finally, a Darwinian framework provides a powerful heuristic for generating testable hypotheses concerning psychological phenomena (Cosmides and Tooby, 1994), and facilitating broadly integrative explanations of them (Buss, 1995).
The idea that depression has evolved in response to specific adaptive problems is by no means a theoretical novelty. The argument enjoys a six-decade history (McGuire and Troisi, 1998), and has drawn contributions from a broad range of theorists (e.g., Allen and Badcock, 2003, Bowlby, 1980, Gilbert, 1992, Nesse, 2000, Price et al., 1994, Watson and Andrews, 2002). Generally, explanatory frameworks that have emerged from this expanding body of literature can be meaningfully grouped into two broad categories: explanations of normative, depressed mood, and explanations that explicitly target more severe, clinically significant depressed states. We shall now consider each of these prevailing schools of thought in turn.
Section snippets
Darwinian models of depressed mood
Although the concept of adaptation should not be reflexively applied to biological and behavioural features without sound logical reasons, we propose that mood states are appropriate targets for an evolutionary analysis. First, they are ubiquitous human capacities indicating a considerable degree of specialization (Cosmides and Tooby, 1994). Second, they are activated by specific contexts, suggesting that their input is specialized (Oatley, 1992). Finally, mood states are characterized by
Evolutionary explanations of clinical depression
According to Nettle (2004), conventional evolutionary accounts of clinical depression can be broadly divided into two categories. The first type of model, the dysregulation view (to which our social risk hypothesis, and other models such as Nesse's, 2000, resource-conservation view and more recent developments of the social competition hypothesis belong), sees clinical depression as a form of dysregulation, chronic over-activation or inappropriate evocation of the mechanism upon which
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