Katie Bowden Scotty Frazier Elaine Matteucci Melissa Ortiz

 Glass, D. J. (2012). Evolutionary clinical psychology, broadly construed: Perspectives on obsessive-compulsive disorder. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 6 (3),

 bsNM bsNM  Anxiety (obsession) and rituals (compulsions)

 CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy  ERP: Exposure and response prevention

 Adaptation: trait shaped by natural selection to solve problems in EEA  Mismatch: once adaptive, but now maladaptive in novel environments  Byproduct: trait is a result of selection of other traits  Balancing selection: trait’s benefits offset its costs in particular environments  Mutation selection balance: minor mutations take longer to be selected against  Lesion

 Symptoms are related to threat-avoidance and once provided fitness benefits  Meta-cognition of risk scenarios  Benefits for entire group

 Environmental mismatch theory and mental disorders as normal functioning processes?  Harmful dysfunction defining a true disorder  Aren’t disorders just a by-product of our complex brains and not adaptations of our ancestors?  But then how can evolution and natural selection account for how common, harmful, and heritable these disorders are?

 Antagonistic pleiotropy: a gene has both harmful and advantageous effects  OCD can serve as a harm-avoidant tendency through balancing selection

 Animal models of OCD paralleled with human exemplar  MV8UU MV8UU  What about the anxiety/obsessive component?  Basal ganglia dysfunction in animals  CBT?

 Murphy and Stich: domain-specific modules are malfunctioning  Could explain 4 dimensions of OCD as 4 different neural pathways/domains of functioning  Feygin et al.: 4 domains are threat-avoidance based

Life without any level of OCD symptoms at all? OCD sufferers are one extreme of the polygenetic trait, what about the other extreme?

 All research domains of biology and psychology are moving towards becoming evolutionary in nature  Does not require strong adaptationism, but might include it

 The article describes a mental disorder as a harmful dysfunction. Do you think this is accurate? Do you think this qualifies OCD as a mental disorder, in either our modern environment or the EEA?

 Broadening this evolutionary approach to other abnormal disorders, what possible adaptations could other disorders have provided to our fitness in the EEA? Or are they mostly by- products? How can we be sure?