Nature & Nurture #76: Dr. Randolph Nesse - Good (Evolutionary) Reasons for Bad Feelings

Dr. Randolph Nesse is a Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the Institute for Social Research at The University of Michigan, and one of the pioneers of the field of evolutionary psychiatry. He is the Founding President of The International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, and author of the book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings.
In this episode we talk about the field of evolutionary psychiatry, and more broadly about the evolution of both negative emotions such as fear and anxiety and positive emotions such as happiness. We talk about how humans have evolved with a “negativity bias” which primes us to sense threat, even in the case of false alarms, and how at the extreme this leads to anxiety disorders. On the other hand, we talk about how either a lack of positive emotion (depression) or excess positive emotion (mania) can be pathological, and how evolution must act to fine-tune our emotions for the right context. Overall, we have good reasons for bad feelings, but knowledge of why our emotions have evolved and what contexts they evolved in can help us fine-tune our emotions in our modern environments.
Find Dr. Nesse’s book and learn more about his work at: goodreasons.info

[@azarnoosh.z]

Thanks for this interview! Very interesting

[@boydhooper4080]

Seriously good discussion. A+

[@kimjin-hyub3413]

Great stuff . . .
You should really put mark the question in footnotes ?

[@walteralter1686]

Every human on the planet suffers from chronic, low intensity PTSD. We are traumatized from the womb onward by every frustration we have ever experienced. For a helpless infant, to be frustrated equals to threat of death and no way to escape ... threatened and helpless. The only strategy for the infant is to lose consciousness of the trauma by memory repression into subconscious darkness. That repressed shit is our Pavlovian psychological foundation. The daily traumas are all indexed in memory along with all aspects of the trauma's circumstance, i.e., the elements of the trauma scene become symbols which become triggers. Our socialization, then, is overlayed on a foundation of trauma lurking just beneath the surface waiting for a trigger to activate a fight or flight reflex response or a psychosomatic linked to a symbolic trauma element. Traumas of the same sort, with similar symbols, over time amplify themselves to the point that they can interfere with rational thought and create neuroses in a weak ego structure. Neuroses are inappropriate or magnified responses to situations that trigger danger reflexes or symbolically internalized/introjected instances of the first trauma of a particular type and can manifest as a psychosomatic symptom or failure of logical observation as in delusional thinking. In extreme cases this can result in debilitation or psychosis. This is the human condition and this is what the ruling class, globalist crypto-Nazi CIA wizards of doom harness when they control events and the perception of events via propaganda. Google "Edward Bernays" for the how of it

[@HealthPoliticsAndProtein]

A thought process like this is not useful