While we know that there are certain behaviors and biological markers associated with both fast and slow life history strategies, the question remains, “what causes some individuals to experience psychological distress, whereas others do not?” After all, having a fast life strategy is neither good nor bad from an evolutionary perspective-it is just adaptive 1 ( Kavanagh and Kahl, 2016). We are going to argue that despite these advances in thinking, there is still a missing link.

More recently these attempts have made use of life history theory, conceptualizing mental illness in terms of behaviors associated with life history strategies, with traits associated with fast strategies initially identified as most reflective of mental health problems (e.g., Del Giudice, 2014, 2016 Hurst and Kavanagh, 2017).Īll of these authors, and others, have made significant contributions to the thinking and understanding around the interplay between biology and the environment in shaping our developmental trajectory and in what clinicians refer to as psychopathology. Over the past 25 years there have been numerous developments and attempts to use evolutionary psychology to help explain the development of mental illness (see for example, Belsky et al., 1991 Ellis et al., 1999, 2017). The mismatch hypothesis has been applied at the biological level in terms of health and disease and we believe that it can also be applied more broadly at the psychological level in terms of perceived expectations in the social environment and the resulting distress-psychopathology-that manifests when our expectations are not met. We propose that the missing link is expectations – a mismatch between expected environmental conditions (including social) set by variations in life history strategies and the current environmental conditions. That is, we all have a life history strategy, but not all of us develop mental health problems. 3School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australiaĭespite advances in knowledge and thinking about using life history theory to explain psychopathology there is still a missing link.

2The Florey Institute for Neuroscience and Mental Health, Heidelberg, VIC, Australia.1ISN Psychology, Institute for Social Neuroscience, Heidelberg, VIC, Australia.

The missing link in human evolution