Evolution and mental health

Is depressed mood an adaptation (e.g. for dealing with social conflict, or infection)? Were autistic people renowned for their exceptional memory and technical skills in the past (as famous autistic people like Temple Grandin claim)? We are testing such evolutionary explanations for common mental “disorders” and are developing better empirical and theoretical frameworks for analyzing mental health from an evolutionary perspective. Our general approach is that depressed mood states might help solve certain adaptive problems, but this can become dysregulated and turn into chronic depression in modern societies; similarly, we view many mental "disorders" (like some forms of autism) as extremes of a spectrum of neurodivergent personality traits that was likely functional in past societies. We also develop frameworks for systematically reviewing and interpreting the empirical evidence pertinent to evolutionary explanations of mental disorders. In addition to such theoretical work, we developed a culturally-adapted questionnaire for measuring neurodivergent traits among the Tsimane people, with the goal to relate them to fitness and other life outcomes in order to better test evolutionary hypotheses and understand how neurodivergent people might have fared in more traditional societies. This quantitative work is supplemented and informed by qualitative ethnographic insights.

• Katiyar T, Hunt AD, Orben A, Chaudhary N, Jaeggi AV (2025) Digital technologies & evolutionary mismatch: Harming, but also healing mental health. Psychological Review
• Hunt AD, Jaeggi AV (2025) The DCIDE framework: systematic investigation of evolutionary hypotheses, exemplified with autism. Biological Reviews 100:1484–1511
• Ilie G, Jaeggi AV (2025) The modular mind and psychiatry: Toward clinical integration with a focus on self-disorders. Frontiers in Psychology 16:1570049
• Hunt A, Merola GP, Carpenter T, Jaeggi AV (2024) Evolutionary perspectives on substance and behavioural addictions: distinct and shared pathways to understanding, prediction and prevention. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 159:105603
• Hunt A, Jaeggi AV (2022) Specialised minds: Extending adaptive explanations of personality to the evolution of psychopathology. Evolutionary Human Sciences 4:e26
• Stieglitz J, Jaeggi AV, Blackwell AD, Trumble BC, Gurven M, Kaplan H (2014) Work to live and live to work: Productivity, transfers, and psychological well-being in adulthood and old age. In: Sociality, hierarchy, health: Comparative biodemography. Edited by M Weinstein and M Lane National Academies Press