The Bargaining Model of Depression--论文代写范文精选

研究人员在遗传学、生物化学、认知心理学、社会心理学、抑郁和心理动力学方面综合思考，从不同的理论视角,但是这些不同的观点还没有被集成到一个单一的、一致的整体。下面的essay代写范文讲述了这一问题。

ABSTRACT 
Minor depression — low mood often accompanied by a loss of motivation — is almost certainly an adaptation to circumstances that, in ancestral environments, imposed a fitness cost. It is, in other words, the psychic equivalent of physical pain. Major depression is characterized by additional symptoms — such as loss of interest in virtually all activities and suicidality — that have no obvious utility. The frequent association of these severe and disabling symptoms with apparently functional symptoms, like sadness and low mood, challenges both dysfunctional and functional accounts of depression. Given that the principal cause of major unipolar depression is a significant negative life event, and that its characteristic symptom is a loss of interest in virtually all activities, it is possible that this syndrome functions somewhat like a labor strike. When powerful others are benefiting from an individual’s efforts, but the individual herself is not benefiting, she can, by reducing her productivity, put her value to them at risk to compel their consent and assistance in renegotiating the social contract so that it will yield net fitness benefits for her. In partial support of this hypothesis, depression is associated with the receipt of considerable social benefits despite the negative reaction it causes in others.

DEPRESSION IS STILL A MYSTERY 
After more than a century of inquiry, unipolar depression remains a profound scientific mystery. Like people working on a large and difficult jigsaw puzzle, researchers in genetics, biochemistry, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and psychodynamics have pieced together detailed accounts of depression from their various theoretical vantage points, but these disparate views have yet to be integrated into a single, coherent whole. Just as an unfinished puzzle often reveals itself in parts that give little clue of the final picture, depression is well understood in aspects, yet no one can answer the question: What, ultimately, is depression? Recent personal problems are clearly implicated in its onset, and psychotherapy — talking about these problems — has been shown to be about as effective in reducing depressive symptoms as the latest antidepressants (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1993). 

These facets of depression must be reconciled with the equally significant genetic and biochemical correlates. As the editor of a recent volume on depression concluded, “Despite a great deal of thorough research there is no agreement concerning etiology, symptomatology, and treatment methods” (Wolman 1990, preface). The editor’s choice of terminology reflects what is perhaps the single point of agreement among depression researchers: major depression is an illness. 

With no consensus on causes, symptoms, or treatment, little-to-no evidence that depression in general is caused by infections, toxins, or physical injury to the brain, excellent evidence that depression is caused by social circumstances that would have occurred repeatedly in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) — often dangerous social circumstances in which a genuine cognitive impairment would have been disastrous — and given that most sufferers of depression experience a complete recovery often in association with (and possibly caused by) major life improvements like getting a better job or relationship, one wonders why there is such conviction that depression is a mental illness. Several unpleasant experiences such as physical pain and nausea are in fact adaptations designed to protect the sufferer from harm. In the first part of this chapter I will argue that there was a selection pressure for the evolution of a bargaining strategy in humans; in the second, I will argue that clinical, unipolar depression may be just such a strategy.

THE INDIVIDUAL VERSUS SOCIETY IN THE EEA 
In the EEA, costly conflicts between individuals and groups were probably common, particularly in the wake of individual social losses and failures. Individuals suffering social losses or failures often need assistance, additional material or social resources, or to renegotiate their relationships with group members. Social partners could not be expected to provide help or make changes immediately, however, particularly when they were benefiting from the status quo. Conflicts between individuals are common in many species and often result in physical aggression because injuring, or threatening to injure, others is an effective means of influencing or deterring their actions (Clutton-Brock and Parker 1995; McElreath 2003). In humans, this strategy is closely identified with the emotion anger (Fessler 2003). There is, however, a key limitation to an aggressive strategy. In the EEA, it would have been difficult for a single individual to use aggression when one’s opponent was physically more formidable, or when one was opposed by a group. If one needed to influence the behavior of a single powerful individual or a group, physical threats (especially by a female) would rarely have been effective: even two people can almost always overpower one.

Persuasion was also an option, but if an individual’s claims were difficult to verify and/or if inherent conflicts of interest existed among the parties, persuasion was likely to fail. Consequently, an effective strategy to compel assistance or change would have provided substantial fitness benefits. The solution proposed here is that one could have efficiently imposed costs on powerful others, thereby influencing them, by withholding benefits that one provided them until desired changes were forthcoming. In other words, individuals could bargain.

Social Conditions in Which Bargaining Can Be Effective 
Bargaining, the withholding of benefits to compel changes by others, can only work, and is only necessary, in particular social circumstances — circumstances that were likely to have been ubiquitous in the EEA. Viscous Social Markets and Monopoly Power When there are many resource providers, i.e., when there is a market instead of a monopoly, one has little need to pay a cost to influence others because one can always obtain the necessary resources elsewhere (resource costs are then determined by the supply and demand curves of standard economic theory).1 In the EEA, however, it may frequently have been the case that there was little-to-no market; all parties often had effective monopolies on resources that were crucial to other group members. 

Kin- and family-based social organization, high levels of biparental care, low population densities, ethnicity, and occasional intergroup aggression meant that switching social partners was difficult. It would have been difficult, for example, for mothers to raise offspring without help from the father and/or other family members; conversely, the fitness of the father, parents, and other family members depended critically on the mother successfully raising offspring. Abandonment of one party by another would have entailed a significant fitness cost to all (for further details, see Hagen 1999). In another typical example, political alliances between families may have often depended on an arranged marriage between a man from one family and a woman from the other, as is commonly seen in contemporary hunter-gatherer groups (Rodseth et al. 1991). If so, important political relationships between families depended critically on sons and daughters; conversely, sons’ or daughters’ relationships with their families depended critically on their willingness to participate in the arranged marriage.

Partners can also maintain an effective monopoly on resources they provide, thereby ensuring their personal importance to others, when they can exclude competitors or when they can easily punish defection, both likely important aspects of ancestral social environments. Punishing defectors, in particular, is increasingly recognized as an important social strategy (e.g., Boyd and Richerson 1988, 1992). The ability to impose costs efficiently on defectors raises the specter that individuals who do not benefit from a cooperative venture could nonetheless be forced to participate despite the fitness costs they might suffer. In sum, the market for certain kinds of social partners in the EEA may often have been anything but fluid. Given this high degree of interdependence in foraging bands (see also Boehm 1996), individuals who withheld benefits would have imposed significant costs on other band members.

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