Anxiety, for example, encouraged our ancestors to avoid dangerous situations however, it obeys what Nesse calls the “smoke detector principle”. Some emotions are particularly prone to dysregulation. Too much good mood (mania) can be as debilitating as too much bad mood (depression). This applies to good moods as well as bad. We can experience too much or too little. Unfortunately, moods can become dysregulated. On the other hand, when circumstances are unfavourable, lowered mood will reduce risk-taking and wasted effort, and en-courage revision of goals and strategies. Mood elevation in favourable circumstances allows individuals to take advantage of opportunities. He contends that emotions have been “selected” because they increase the chances of survival and the transmission of genes from one generation to the next. This is a relatively new field and it’s too early to ascertain whether it will have a significant impact on the way psychiatry is practised, but given the indisputable power of Darwin’s thinking, one can be reasonably optimistic. His book is wisely subtitled In-sights From the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry. In Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, American psychiatrist and research scientist Randolph M Nesse makes a compelling case for locating mental illness within an evolutionary frame-work.
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