Living and Dying in Asylumland
Petteri Pietikainen in Madness, 2015
What could have been the root cause of such a tremendous increase in the number of mental patients? Many contemporaries saw the increase as merely a by-product of population growth – more people equals more mentally ill people. Other commentators pointed to the detrimental psychophysical consequences of social evolution, asserting that modern urban civilization was unnatural or even ‘pathogenic’. This suggested that western civilization caused degeneration which manifested itself in madness and other forms of mental and physical decay. Those who paid close attention to statistics could speculate that there was an increasing number of certified lunatics simply because there was an increasing number of administrators and medical doctors who were preoccupied with the question of mental health in the general population. Others claimed that medical progress itself, including better hygiene and improved diagnostic tools, contributed to a greater number of patients who survived in hospitals, where mortality had traditionally been high.
Loneliness and social pain
Stephen Buetow in From Loneliness to Solitude in Person-centred Health Care, 2023
The second perspective is that sociality is not an inherent and inevitable part of being human. It is less collective than personal, operating through decisions rather than instincts or drives. Not social by nature,26 humans have learnt to band together in social groups. The social evolution of humans to abide in tribal settings increases their fitness to survive and thrive. Accordingly, human brains have been wired, rather than are hard-wired, to be sociable. Changing human habitats are rewiring human capabilities to function as increasingly autonomous agents with only a basic need for social connection.27 With reduced opportunities to put down social roots, persons are discovering new ways to reconcile their individuality with sociality. Being alone together is one way.28,29 Part II of this book will discuss how and why persons can redeem this prescription to manage loneliness. For now, I want to explore six interrelated reasons for not viewing loneliness primarily in social terms.
Health promotion in the context of employment and unemployment
Théodore H. MacDonald in Rethinking Health Promotion, 2012
The dream, of course, is the rather unrealistic one of unrestricted growth. If the technological society is to realise the aspirations of ‘limitless accumulation of wealth, and the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires’ (Fukuyama 1992), then its social culture must become both liberal and democratic. Through a process of social evolution, he avers, this form of organisation has become the most adept at containing the ‘liberated’ population, and he predicts that it will become the natural political and economic destiny of the developing economies. Citing the western European and American democratic models as illustrations of the process, he states that consequences of liberalisation and democratisation are such that, as standards of living increase, and as populations became more cosmopolitan and better educated, society as a whole achieved a greater equality of condition, and ‘people began to demand not simply more wealth but recognition for their status’ (Fukuyama 1992). More succinctly, as life’s experiences change, so do the expectations borne of those experiences.
The Dark Side of Morality – Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for Violence
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2020
Clifford I. Workman, Keith J. Yoder, Jean Decety
The positive parametric relationship with appropriateness ratings that characterized the vmPFC in this study may appear to contradict findings reviewed above that indicate a central role of the vmPFC in giving rise to prosocial moral emotions, specifically (Moll and de Oliveira-Souza 2007). Decisions to act violently can be motivated, not only by a desire to act antisocially toward outgroup members, but also by a desire to behave prosocially toward in-group members (Molenberghs et al. 2015; Domínguez et al. 2018; Molenberghs et al. 2016). This view is consistent with the gene-culture coevolution theory, which accounts for human other-regarding preferences like fairness, the capacity to empathize, and salience of morality (Gintis 2011). Mathematical modeling of social evolution, together with evidence from anthropological studies, indicates that intragroup (tribal) motivations to help and cooperate with others co-evolved through intergroup competition over valuable resources (Boyd and Richerson 2009). During the late Pleistocene, groups that had higher numbers of prosocial people worked together more effectively and were thusly able to outcompete, passing genes relating to adaptive behaviors transmitted to the next generation and resulting in the spread of the hyperprosociality that characterizes our species (Bowles 2012).
Willingness to lend resources is associated with increases in recovery and participation in community activities
Published in Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions, 2022
Leonard A. Jason, MA Ted Bobak, Mohammed Islam, Mayra Guerrero, John M. Light, Nate Doogan
Social network analysis of 42 OHs was conducted using the stochastic actor-oriented modeling (SAOM) framework as implemented in the R package RSiena (Ripley et al., 2021). A thorough and intuitive review and example use of the software to construct and estimate a SAOM can be found in Snijders et al. (2010).1A SAOM consists of a set of equations, one for each endogenous variable, expressed as a function of a set of predictors – referred to by the software, and in later parts of this article as ‘effects.’ The equations can share common endogenous or exogenous variables and can thus be interlinked in useful ways to model social evolution. SAOM portray network evolution as individual residents creating, maintaining or terminating ties to other residents. It is understandable for social scientists to think that decisions of residents are influenced by both the structure of the network and characteristics of the resident and the other members who are making a decision. In brief, SAOMs model these characteristics as predictors of network evolution. Moreover, the framework is explicitly longitudinal; any given model generates a specific (though probabilistic) causal sequence of network and behavioral changes. As an example, it has been used to show that adolescent smokers tend to become friends with each other and, further, friends tend to become similar in their smoking habits (e.g., Mercken et al., 2007).
The Entanglement of Being: Sexuality Inside and Outside the Binary
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
Although many gender and sexuality scholars are trained in poststructural and postmodern thinking, it is crucial to consider the materiality of sexual embodiment. That same-sex sex occurs frequently and that gender expressions and roles are diversified throughout the human and animal world is not a moral argument. However, it certainly refutes erroneous claims that homosexuality and gender variance do not exist, are unnatural, have no evolutionary function, or are entirely dependent on cultural production or specific to historical context. It challenges us to explore sexual and gender diversity as fundamental to our biology and central to our social evolution. Observing the instinctual sexual diversity across species, including our own, helps us to consider reproductive and nonreproductive sexualities as functions of a more largely defined social and biological generativity. Similar to the multiply gendered animal world, we too are coming to terms with our embodied sex variations, gender identifications, and proliferating multiple forms of kinship. It is easy to start feeling that culture has only gotten in the way of our biology, but this would also be far too simplistic.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Altruism
- Animal
- Inbreeding
- Kin Selection
- Fitness
- Evolutionary Biology
- Philopatry
- Natural Selection
- Haplodiploidy
- Precociality & Altriciality