Review article
Darwinian models of depression: A review of evolutionary accounts of mood and mood disorders

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Abstract

Over the last ten years, there has been increased interest in the evolutionary origins of depressive phenomena. The current article provides a review of the major schools of thought that have emerged in this area. First, we consider important Darwinian explanations of depressed mood, including an integrative social risk hypothesis recently proposed by the authors. According to the social risk hypothesis, depression represents an adaptive response to the perceived threat of exclusion from important social relationships that, over the course of evolution, have been critical to maintaining an individual's fitness prospects. We argue, moreover, that in the ancestral environment, depression minimized the likelihood of exclusion by inducing: (i) cognitive hypersensitivity to indicators of social risk/threat; (ii) signaling behaviours that reduce social threat and elicit social support; and (iii) a generalized reduction in an individual's propensity to engage in risky, appetitive behaviours. Neurobiological support for this argument is also provided. Finally, we review three models that endeavour to explain the relationship between the adaptations that underlie depressed mood and clinically significant, depressed states, followed by a consideration of the merits of each.

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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