Allen Nicholas B, Badcock Paul B T
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry. 2006 Jul;30(5):815-26. doi: 10.1016/j.pnpbp.2006.01.007. Epub 2006 Apr 27.
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.
在过去十年中，人们对抑郁现象的进化起源越来越感兴趣。本文对该领域出现的主要思想流派进行了综述。首先，我们考虑抑郁情绪的重要达尔文主义解释，包括作者最近提出的综合社会风险假说。根据社会风险假说，抑郁是对感知到的被重要社会关系排斥的威胁的一种适应性反应，在进化过程中，这种关系对维持个体的健康前景至关重要。此外，我们认为，在原始环境中，抑郁通过诱导以下因素将被排斥的可能性降至最低：（i）对社会风险/威胁指标的认知超敏反应；（ii）减少社会威胁并获得社会支持的信号行为；（iii）个体从事危险、有欲望行为的倾向普遍降低。本文还提供了这一观点的神经生物学支持。最后，我们回顾了三种试图解释构成抑郁情绪基础的适应性与临床上显著的抑郁状态之间关系的模型，随后对每种模型的优点进行了考量。
