Evolution, emotions, and emotional disorders.
2009/02/01 by Randolph M. Nesse, Phoebe C. Ellsworth · 376 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Artificial intelligence #Cognitive psychology #Computer science #Cultural Differences and Values #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Evolutionary psychology #Natural selection #Psychology #Rendering (computer graphics) #Selection (genetic algorithm) #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1037/a0013503
published in American Psychologist 64(2), 129-139 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 2009/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Abstract
Emotions research is now routinely grounded in evolution, but explicit evolutionary analyses of emotions remain rare. This article considers the implications of natural selection for several classic questions about emotions and emotional disorders. Emotions are special modes of operation shaped by natural selection. They adjust multiple response parameters in ways that have increased fitness in adaptively challenging situations that recurred over the course of evolution. They are valenced because selection shapes special processes for situations that have influenced fitness in the past. In situations that decrease fitness, negative emotions are useful and positive emotions are harmful. Selection has partially differentiated subtypes of emotions from generic precursor states to deal with specialized situations. This has resulted in untidy emotions that blur into each other on dozens of dimensions, rendering the quest for simple categorically distinct emotions futile. Selection has shaped flexible mechanisms that control the expression of emotions on the basis of an individual's appraisal of the meaning of events for his or her ability to reach personal goals. The prevalence of emotional disorders can be attributed to several evolutionary factors.
Cited by
- Attention to emotion and reliance on feelings in decision-making: Variations on a pleasure principle
- Pain and emotion: a biopsychosocial review of recent research
- Many facets of self-directed behaviours in macaques
- Digital Emotion Regulation
- Effect of Vocal Anesthesia on Adult Dental Patients during Covid-19 pandemic period
- Emotion in animal contests
- Anxiety: An Evolutionary Approach
- Anger, hostility, internalizing negative emotions, and intimate partner violence perpetration: A meta-analytic review
- To Analyze Thrill, Define Extreme Sports
- Wisdom in a complex world: A situated account of wise reasoning and its development
- Predator-induced fear causes PTSD-like changes in the brains and behaviour of wild animals
- Emergence and maintenance of modularity in neural networks with Hebbian and anti-Hebbian inhibitory STDP
- Compassion: an evolutionary analysis and empirical review. [europepmc]
- Interpersonal goals and change in anxiety and dysphoria in first-semester college students. [europepmc]
- An integrative and functional framework for the study of animal emotion and mood. [europepmc]
- Regulatory Focus and Anxiety: A Self-Regulatory Model of GAD-Depression Comorbidity. [europepmc]
- Pain and emotion: a biopsychosocial review of recent research. [europepmc]
- Blue again: perturbational effects of antidepressants suggest monoaminergic homeostasis in major depression. [europepmc]
- Emotional brain rhythms and their impairment in post-traumatic patients. [europepmc]
- Anger, hostility, internalizing negative emotions, and intimate partner violence perpetration: A meta-analytic review. [europepmc]
- Opposite Effects of Early-Life Competition and Developmental Telomere Attrition on Cognitive Biases in Juvenile European Starlings. [europepmc]
- Qualitative Analysis of Emotions: Fear and Thrill. [europepmc]
- Evolutionary Considerations on the Emerging Subculture of the E-psychonauts and the Novel Psychoactive Substances: A Comeback to the Shamanism? [europepmc]
- Attachment Style and Chronic Pain: Toward an Interpersonal Model of Pain. [europepmc]
- Ectoparasite defence in humans: relationships to pathogen avoidance and clinical implications. [europepmc]
- I love you from the bottom of my hypothalamus: The role of stress physiology in romantic pair bond formation and maintenance. [europepmc]
- Physiological outcomes of calming behaviors support the resilience hypothesis in horses. [europepmc]
- Predator-induced fear causes PTSD-like changes in the brains and behaviour of wild animals. [europepmc]
- Emotion in animal contests. [europepmc]
- Molecules, Mechanisms, and Disorders of Self-Domestication: Keys for Understanding Emotional and Social Communication from an Evolutionary Perspective. [europepmc]
- Compassionate goals, prosocial emotions, and prosocial behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic. [europepmc]
- How Communication Technology Fosters Individual and Social Wellbeing During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Preliminary Support For a Digital Interaction Model. [europepmc]
- The Longitudinal Relationship Between Emotion Regulation and Pain-Related Outcomes: Results From a Large, Online Prospective Study. [europepmc]
- A psychological flexibility perspective on well-being: Emotional reactivity, adaptive choices, and daily experiences. [europepmc]
- Emotions as computations. [europepmc]
- Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges. [europepmc]
- The nature and neurobiology of fear and anxiety: State of the science and opportunities for accelerating discovery. [europepmc]
Related