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Summary: Our Human Faults in a Darwinian Light
Review: This is the first book to bring together classic and contemporary readings illustrating the new subdiscipline, evolutionary psychopathology. Psychology has been one of the slowest of the biological sciences to be "Darwinized", that is, integrated with evolutionary theory. A major milestone in this transition was the publication of Barkow et al's The Adapted Mind in 1992, which has become a seminal book for the new field of evolutionary psychology. Baron-Cohen's new book The Maladapted Mind takes this approach one step further in highlighting how mechanisms in the brain which normally enable us to be well-adapted to survival in our environment can occasionally malfunction, leading individuals to develop what we recognize as psychiatric disorder. Each chapter demonstrates how evolutionary arguments are being brought to bear on the study of a different psychiatric condition or pathological behavior. These include anxiety, depression, psychopathic personality and autism. This new framework should lead to new insights into the aetiology of psychiatric conditions, and at the same time illustrate how the study of such mental abnormalities can reveal the existence of basic neurocognitive mechanisms in the 'normal' mind that have been overlooked. This book is aimed primarily at advanced students and researchers in the fields of psychiatry, abnormal psychology, biological anthropology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. Contents: S. Baron-Cohen: Preface: Why Evolutionary Psychopathology? R. Nesse, G. Williams: Are Mental Disorders Diseases? M. McGuire, I. Marks, R. Nesse, A. Troisi: Evolutionary Biology: A Basic Science for Psychiatry? D. Wilson: Evolutionary Epidemiology: Darwinian Theory in the Service of Medicine and Psychiatry I. Marks, R. Nesse: Fear and Fitness: An Evolutionary Analysis of Anxiety Disorders R. Nesse: An Evolutionary Perspective on Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia R. James Blair: A Cognitive Developmental Approach to Morality: Investigating the Psychopath M. Daly, M. Wilson: Evolutionary Social Psychology and Family Homicide L. Mealey: The Sociobiology of Sociopathy: An Integrated Evolutionary Model L.A. Dugatkin: The Evolution of the "Con-Artist" S. Baron-Cohen: How to Build a Baby That Can Read Minds: Cognitive Mechanisms in Mindreading J. Price, L. Sloman, R. Gardner, P. Gilbert, P. Rohde: The Social Competition Hypothesis of Depression M. McGuire, A. Troisi, M. Raleigh: Depression in an Evolutionary Context.
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