Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, Emotion and Development Branch (Pine), and Section on the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Laboratory of Neuropsychology (Murray), NIMH, Bethesda, Md.; Olschefskie Institute for the Neurobiology of Knowledge, Bethesda, Md. (Wise).
Am J Psychiatry. 2021 Aug 1;178(8):701-714. doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.20081187. Epub 2021 Jun 3.
Although rodent research provides important insights into neural correlates of human psychology, new cortical areas, connections, and cognitive abilities emerged during primate evolution, including human evolution. Comparison of human brains with those of nonhuman primates reveals two aspects of human brain evolution particularly relevant to emotional disorders: expansion of homotypical association areas and expansion of the hippocampus. Two uniquely human cognitive capacities link these phylogenetic developments with emotion: a subjective sense of participating in and reexperiencing remembered events and a limitless capacity to imagine details of future events. These abilities provided evolving humans with selective advantages, but they also created proclivities for emotional problems. The first capacity evokes the "reliving" of past events in the "here-and-now," accompanied by emotional responses that occurred during memory encoding. It contributes to risk for stress-related syndromes, such as posttraumatic stress disorder. The second capacity, an ability to imagine future events without temporal limitations, facilitates flexible, goal-related behavior by drawing on and creating a uniquely rich array of mental representations. It promotes goal achievement and reduces errors, but the mental construction of future events also contributes to developmental aspects of anxiety and mood disorders. With maturation of homotypical association areas, the concrete concerns of childhood expand to encompass the abstract apprehensions of adolescence and adulthood. These cognitive capacities and their dysfunction are amenable to a research agenda that melds experimental therapeutic interventions, cognitive neuropsychology, and developmental psychology in both humans and nonhuman primates.
尽管啮齿动物研究为人类心理学的神经相关性提供了重要的见解，但在灵长类动物进化过程中，包括人类进化过程中，出现了新的皮质区域、连接和认知能力。将人类大脑与非人类灵长类动物的大脑进行比较，揭示了人类大脑进化与情绪障碍特别相关的两个方面：同型联想区域的扩展和海马体的扩展。人类特有的两种认知能力将这些系统发育发展与情感联系起来：主观地参与和重新体验记忆事件的感觉，以及无限想象未来事件细节的能力。这些能力为不断进化的人类提供了选择性优势，但也为情绪问题创造了倾向。第一种能力唤起“现在”对过去事件的“重温”，伴随着在记忆编码过程中发生的情绪反应。它会增加与压力相关的综合征的风险，例如创伤后应激障碍。第二种能力，即不受时间限制地想象未来事件的能力，通过利用和创造独特而丰富的心理表象，促进灵活的、与目标相关的行为。它促进目标的实现并减少错误，但对未来事件的心理构建也会导致焦虑和情绪障碍的发展方面。随着同型联想区域的成熟，儿童的具体关注点扩展到包括青少年和成年期的抽象理解。这些认知能力及其功能障碍可以通过将实验治疗干预、认知神经心理学和人类和非人类灵长类动物的发展心理学结合起来的研究议程来解决。
