Life Goals, Evolution and Mood:

Unifying ideographic and nomothetic approaches to depression

 

Randolph M. Nesse

 

Professor of Psychiatry, Professor of Psychology, Research Associate RCGD ISR,

Director, Evolution and Human Adaptation Program, The University of Michigan

                      

Tuesday, September 11

 4:00 P.M. 

Coffee and tea at 3:30

4448 East Hall

 

Précis

The power of an evolutionary approach to understand mood and depression seems to collapse when it confronts ideographic diversity.  The same life event, say a pregnancy that brings joy to one person causes suicidal depression in another.  The relationship between life situations and mood makes sense only in the context of an individual’s goals.  An enduring line of research in psychology has investigated how mood is influenced by success or failure in the pursuit of major life goals, but this research has never been united with its proper foundation in behavioral ecology with its sophisticated methods that allow careful description and prediction of how organisms allocate their effort.  Neither field has made full use of new knowledge about the neural mechanisms that regulate mood.  Sociology has independently pursued studies of how people form, chose, pursue, and give up on goals in different cultural contexts.  This lecture will argue that the capacity for mood is part of a domain general mechanism shaped by natural selection to allocate effort away from goal pursuits that are failing, and towards those that are paying off.  This approach allows an evolutionary perspective to be brought to bear on the problem of mood despite the vast differences in individual goals and cultural contexts.  It also offers a framework that may foster integration of work in several separate fields.  The presentation will introduce a mathematical model of mood that compares the reproductive success of hypothetical individuals with and without a capacity for mood.  It will also present preliminary results from a recent ISR community study of life goals and mood, and will set the stage for the subsequent lectures in the series. 

 

Next Week, September 18th  !!!Note special time and location!!!

Paul Baltes: The biocultural dynamics of the life course: A difficult journey into the Fourth Age?

1:00 PM Tuesday Sept. 18^th, Room 6050 Institute for Social Research

 

The Evolution and Human Adaptation Program Lectures are sponsored by the LS&A Dean's Office,

the Research Center for Group Dynamics at ISR, and the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry

To add your name to the mailing list of events sponsored by EHAP, send a note to ehap@umich.edu