Results from a Prospective Study of Widowhood

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142735/1/Brown-Nesse-Religion-PSPB-2004.pd

The Daily Consequences of Widowhood: The Role of Gender and Intergenerational Transfers on subsequent Housework Performance

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142738/1/Nesse-Carr-House_Perf-JFI-2004.pd

The effects of central cholecystokinin receptor blockade on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal and symptomatic responses to overnight withdrawal from alprazolam

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142739/1/Abelson-Nesse-alprazolam-BioPsych-1995.pd

Sex and sexuality: An evolutionary view

In this article, I first offer a summary of Darwin’s main ideas, especially relating to sex, and explain how these have been elaborated by more recent evolutionary scholars. I then give an account of the historical divergence between psychoanalysis and classical Darwinian thought, and describe how the early psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein tried to counter this by addressing some biological themes in her work. Following a review of some contemporary attempts to bring psychoanalysis and evolutionary thought into alignment with each other, I make some suggestions regarding a view of sex and sexuality that would be sound in evolutionary terms while also being helpful in psychoanalytic ones

Resilience to loss and chronic grief: A prospective study from preloss to 18-months postloss

The vast majority of bereavement research is conducted after a loss has occurred. Thus, knowledge of the divergent trajectories of grieving or their antecedent predictors is lacking. This study gathered prospective data on 205 individuals several years prior to the death of their spouse and at 6- and 18-months postloss. Five core bereavement patterns were identified: common grief, chronic grief, chronic depression, improvement during bereavement, and resilience. Common grief was relatively infrequent, and the resilient pattern most frequent. The authors tested key hypotheses in the literature pertaining to chronic grief and resilience by identifying the preloss predictors of each pattern. Chronic grief was associated with preloss dependency and resilience with preloss acceptance of death and belief in a just world. The death of a spouse is generally assumed to be one of the most stressful experiences that people encounter during the course of their lives (Holmes & Rahe, 1967). However, there are marked individual differences in how much and for how long people grieve (Bonanno & Kaltman, 1999, 2001; Wortman & Silver, 1989, 2001). In addition to what is assumed to be the typical or common reaction, an initial increase in depression that gradually subsides over time, several other patterns of grief have been discussed in the literature. These include prolonged or chronic grieving, the noticeable absence of grief symptoms, and delayed grief responses. Social and personality psychologists have become increasingly interested in these different trajectories, and how they compare with those observed for other marital transitions and othe

A synergy of costly punishment and commitment in cooperation dilemmas

To ensure cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, individuals may require prior commitments from others, subject to compensations when agreements to cooperate are violated. Alternatively, individuals may prefer to behave reactively, without arranging prior commitments, by simply punishing those who misbehave. These two mechanisms have been shown to promote the emergence of cooperation, yet are complementary in the way they aim to promote cooperation. Although both mechanisms have their specific limitations, either one of them can overcome the problems of the other. On one hand, costly punishment requires an excessive effect-to-cost ratio to be successful, and this ratio can be significantly reduced by arranging a prior commitment with a more limited compensation. On the other hand, commitment-proposing strategies can be suppressed by free-riding strategies that commit only when someone else is paying the cost to arrange the deal, whom in turn can be dealt with more effectively by reactive punishers. Using methods from Evolutionary Game Theory, we present here an analytical model showing that there is a wide range of settings for which the combined strategy outperforms either strategy by itself, leading to significantly higher levels of cooperation. Interestingly, the improvement is most significant when the cost of arranging commitments is sufficiently high and the penalty reaches a certain threshold, thereby overcoming the weaknesses of both mechanisms.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Effort Perception is Made More Accurate with More Effort and When Cooperating with Slackers

Recent research on the conditions that facilitate cooperation is limited by a factor that has yet to be established: the accuracy of effort perception. Accuracy matters because the fitness of cooperative strategies depends not just on being able to perceive others' effort but to perceive their true effort. In an experiment using a novel effort-tracker methodology, we calculate the accuracy of human effort perceptions and show that accuracy is boosted by more absolute effort (regardless of relative effort) and when cooperating with a "slacker" rather than an "altruist". A formal model shows how such an effort-prober strategy is likely to be an adaptive solution because it gives would-be collaborators information on when to abort ventures that are not in their interest and opt for ones that are. This serves as a precautionary measure against systematic exploitation by extortionist strategies and a descent into uncooperativeness. As such, it is likely that humans have a bias to minimize mistakes in effort perception that would commit them to a disadvantageous effort-reward relationship. Overall we find support for the idea that humans have evolved smart effort detection systems that are made more accurate by those contexts most relevant for cooperative tasks

New perspectives on evolutionary medicine: the relevance of microevolution for human health and disease

Evolutionary medicine (EM) is a growing field focusing on the evolutionary basis of human diseases and their changes through time. To date, the majority of EM studies have used pure theories of hominin macroevolution to explain the present-day state of human health. Here, we propose a different approach by addressing more empirical and health-oriented research concerning past, current and future microevolutionary changes of human structure, functions and pathologies. Studying generation-to-generation changes of human morphology that occurred in historical times, and still occur in present-day populations under the forces of evolution, helps to explain medical conditions and warns clinicians that their current practices may influence future humans. Also, analyzing historic tissue specimens such as mummies is crucial in order to address the molecular evolution of pathogens, of the human genome, and their coadaptations.Frank Jakobus Rühli and Maciej Henneber