ReviewEvolutionary human sciences2022
Specialised minds: extending adaptive explanations of personality to the evolution of psychopathology.
Review in Evolutionary human sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Integrating Ultimate and Proximate Explanations of Neurodivergence: Evolutionary Trade-Offs, Compensation, and Clinical Expression.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Beyond Comorbidity: Evolutionary Insights Into the Concomitance of Neurodivergence, Major Depressive Disorder, and Anxiety Disorders.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Evolutionary research on mental health in non-industrialized contexts: An introduction to the special issue.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- The DCIDE framework: systematic investigation of evolutionary hypotheses, exemplified with autism.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- "Are You Sick? No, I am Neurodivergent!" The Perilous Navigation Between Medicalization and Diagnostic Nihilism.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2025Article
- Human Reproductive Egalitarianism: A Catalyst for the Evolution of Personality Traits.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2025Article
- Assessing subclinical psychopathological and personality traits in a small-scale subsistence society.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2025Article
- ADHD and ASD are Normal Biological Variations as part of Human Evolution and are not "Disorders".Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2024Article
- Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2023Article
- Cortisol reactivity to psychosocial stress in vulnerable and grandiose narcissists: An exploratory study.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Introduction to the special collection: The expression of the emotions in man and animals.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Is it good to be bad? An evolutionary analysis of the adaptive potential of psychopathic traits.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Traditional evolutionary theory invoked natural and sexual selection to explain species- and sex-typical traits. However, some heritable inter-individual variability in behaviour and psychology - personality - is probably adaptive. Here we extend this insight to common psychopathological traits. Reviewing key findings from three background areas of importance - theoretical models, non-human personality and evolved human social dynamics - we propose that a combination of social niche specialisation, negative frequency-dependency, balancing selection and adaptive developmental plasticity should explain adaptation for individual differences in psychology - 'specialised minds' - explaining some variance in personality and psychopathology trait dimensions, which share various characteristics. We suggest that anthropological research of behavioural differences should be extended past broad demographic factors (age and sex) to include individual specialisations. As a first step towards grounding psychopathology in ancestral social structure, we propose a minimum plausible prevalence, given likely ancestral group sizes, for negatively frequency-dependent phenotypes to be maintained as specialised tails of adaptive distributions - below the calculated prevalence, specialisation is highly unlikely. For instance, chronic highly debilitating forms of autism or schizophrenia are too rare for such explanations, whereas attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder and broad autism phenotypes are common enough to have existed in most hunter-gatherer bands, making adaptive explanations more plausible.
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