Evolutionary Advatange Of Feelings of Sadness

[amigocabal]

I can not understand why humans need the capacity to feel sad or to have negative attitudes. As far as I can tell, no good comes from having such feelings or attitudes. It does not make them more fit to survive to breed to the next generation. In fact, such feelings and attitudes can lead to suicide.

Is there something about those feelings and attitudes that I am missing that helps people survive to breed to the next generation? What would the world be like if, for some reason, everyone was permanently happy and had a permanent positive attitude regardless of external circumstances?

[Lord Revan]

the way I read feeling sad or shame is needed for social dynamics to work (remember humans are social animals not loners by nature).

[Lagmonster]

Imagine if you couldn't feel unhappy about, say, your kids starving to death. Or the shame of betraying your hunting pack for selfish reasons. I'd imagine that being miserable serves a very important survival purpose unless you're such a badass predator and biological marvel that nothing can harm you.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Sadness and negative attitudes are not necessarily unique to humans, either. Obviously it is difficult to ascribe emotional states to animals, because you run the risk of improperly anthropomorphizing. However, the chemical/neurophysiological state we associate with sadness can also be found in other social animals.

It is really pretty elementary when you think about it. Without some sort of positive-negative feedback loop, how can intelligence even exist? There needs to be a cognitive faculty that lets you evaluate certain actions or events as being "bad," allowing you to prevent them from occurring again. Otherwise, why would you care if your prodigy are devoured by wolves? Negative emotions are what reinforce this incredibly basic psychological mechanism. Now, factor in the increasing evolutionary importance of social dynamics and bonding, and these same emotions become associated with a wider range of actions or events. It really is that simple. It is a necessary component of being able to decide whether something is "good" or "bad," and avoiding the latter in the case of the former. And it is no coincidence that things your brain decides are "good" are the ones with a clear evolutionary/sexual benefit, which the "bad" ones lack.

As for suicide and real clinical depression ... well, genetics are highly variable, and when you get 7 billion people all those little .0001% variations start to add up.

EDIT: And if everyone were improperly happy, social interactions become completely random, because without emotional feedback there is no method for these interactions to operate.

[amigocabal]

Imagine if you couldn't feel unhappy about, say, your kids starving to death. Or the shame of betraying your hunting pack for selfish reasons. I'd imagine that being miserable serves a very important survival purpose unless you're such a badass predator and biological marvel that nothing can harm you.

It makes sense, in an evolutionary perspective, to have negative emotional reactions to one's conduct if such conduct was detrimental to the survival of one's offspring or the chances of surviving long enough to breed to the next generation. Indeed, some psychological disorders are essentially overreactions. Combat-related PTSD is, for example, an emotional overreaction to engaging in combat, an activity which lowers one's chances to survive to breed the next generation.

But what about the psychological and emotional trauma caused by rape? This trauma was observed since antiquity. See 2 Samuel 13:1-20. This trauma clearly does not arise from the victim's conduct. And it clearly does not make the victim more likely to survive to breed to the next generation. How then, does a rape victim's psychological and emotional reaction to rape serve an evolutionary purpose?

[Ziggy Stardust]

Combat-related PTSD is, for example, an emotional overreaction to engaging in combat, an activity which lowers one's chances to survive to breed the next generation.

That's part of it. The other part is that having elevated levels of adrenaline and stress hormones for extended periods of time is damaging to your body. The body isn't designed for that level of exposure to these chemicals. You know how E. coli exists naturally in the human intestines, but you get sick from it only when the natural relative balances of the bacteria become unstable? It's a similar phenomenon with stress hormones/adrenaline/etc. It's a disruption of the natural biochemical balance, and the longer the exposure the worse the potential damage.

But what about the psychological and emotional trauma caused by rape? This trauma was observed since antiquity. See 2 Samuel 13:1-20. This trauma clearly does not arise from the victim's conduct. And it clearly does not make the victim more likely to survive to breed to the next generation. How then, does a rape victim's psychological and emotional reaction to rape serve an evolutionary purpose?

This is like asking what role skin serves, evolutionarily, because you can get sunburns. Or asking why people have legs because sometimes we break them.

The psychological and emotional trauma caused by rape is little different from than PTSD (honestly, you can make the argument that it IS PTSD, because of how tremendous the overlap is between them. The main differences are due more to ingrained social mores than actual neurophysiology). It is essentially an overdose of stress hormones, which does long-term damage to your brain. Most other situations don't expose you to those levels. To get back to my sunburn analogy, you are constantly being exposed to solar radiation in one form or another, but it rarely affects you. If you are overexposed, though, it causes damage. Sometimes the damage can be long-term, or even permanent (skin cancer). It doesn't necessarily reflect on the underlying evolutionary mechanisms, although you can learn valuable information about those from these extreme cases.

[Junghalli]

But what about the psychological and emotional trauma caused by rape? This trauma was observed since antiquity. See 2 Samuel 13:1-20. This trauma clearly does not arise from the victim's conduct. And it clearly does not make the victim more likely to survive to breed to the next generation. How then, does a rape victim's psychological and emotional reaction to rape serve an evolutionary purpose?

Rape victims who get sad and/or angry are more likely to complain to relatives, friends/allies, or tribal leaders who will then punish or exact retribution on the rapist. Rape victims who are not bothered by being raped are less likely to try to avoid it. Behaviors that make you less likely to be raped (either by avoidance or by getting retribution to be exacted on the rapist) are selected for because rape is a way for males to bypass female mate choice behaviors, and female mate choice behaviors are there (among other things) to prevent impregnation by males with bad genes.

Yes, this is a just-so story, but my point is it's not hard to imagine reasons why negative emotional reactions to rape would be selected for, and I expect the same is true of a lot of things that upset us.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

in an evolutionary perspective

What evolution? Feelings of sadness are influenced by genes, yes, but what triggers sadness? If, as you say, sadness makes no sense "in an evolutionary perspective", then I'd guess there would be people randomly carrying sadness genes, and they'd die and only people without them would survive. That's how evolution actually works. As long as a mutation isn't harmful to survival at all it's kosher, and if you benefit from it, then more power to you.

In fact, sadness might be a way to increase survivability. Signs of sadness can make others feel protective of you, and this includes sex partners. It is also an innate way to be informed of what is harmful or bad, like pain -you feel pain when you prick yourself so you stop pricking yourself. No, no, put that thing down, man. Don't insert it -oh Jesus. It is fucked up.

Sadness is generally something that all people suffer, is situationally useful, and is more or less caused by outside circumstances which aren't under your control (not just 'sometimes'; more like 'almost anytime'), with no genes to mark it apart for evolution to eliminate. Perhaps, though, you'll feel better knowing that people all over history have wondered why we feel pain or sorrow, so... yeah. Old problems without definite answers.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Combat-related PTSD is, for example, an emotional overreaction to engaging in combat, an activity which lowers one's chances to survive to breed the next generation.

Fear is good. Fear keeps you alive. It keeps you from doing stupid shit like charging a machine gun nest and getting yourself shot. Too much fear, however, and you start having problems. We did not evolve under conditions where organized bloody combat was a thing--short frenzied violence yes, but not hours days or weeks of battle. The long duration of fear causes psychological harm precisely because we did not evolve to experience it for that long.

That is step 1

Step 2. We are social animals. We want to protect those we are close to. This urge can cause us to temporarily ignore our fear, and charge that gun nest. There are however consequences of shoving all that fear into the back of the mind for a few minutes and do something potentially deadly. The point of fear is that it makes you avoid death. If you go charging into it, that dials the fear up to 11. This can cause more bad shit.

Step 3. We are social animals. That same urge to protect someone also makes us get psychologically fucked up if we see someone torn to shreds by a land mine.

As for rape...

What is in anyone's best interests? Protecting themselves and ensuring that their mate selection is their own. You dont expect that there would be a mechanism that motivates us to avoid being overpowered, have our control of our own bodies taken away, and potentially being impregnated against our will? Are you kidding? Even if you take pregnancy out of the equation, rape is an act of social domination. Rape takes our power over ourselves away, and relegates us to what is, in our little monkey brains, the most abjectly low part of the social hierarchy. Of course that will be traumatizing.

[Serafina]

You must also keep in mind that the human psyche is a very interconnected thing - and thus not all emotions and behaviors might themself be evolutionarily desirable.

If you take fear as an example, there's plenty of reasons to have it, because it offers plenty of advantages. However, evolution selects for the amount where it provides an advantage and which your species normally experiences. That creates certain structures and responses. Change the parameters into an extraordinary situation, and not only don't you have significant selective pressure - but the beneficial structures overload and do something disadvantageous.

A relatively simple example is fat storage. The ability to store fat in our bodies is a huge advantage, because it allows us to carry reserves that prevent us from starving. Better yet it can insulate us, and we most likely need that during could (and therefore sparse) times.
However, that mechanism doesn't have an in-built off-switch when it reaches a certain limit - because there never really was evolutionary pressure where people regularly reached that stage. Thus, we can get fatter and fatter to the point of dangerous obesity.
Now if our species had evolved in an environment where we had plenty of food, but needed fat as insulation while retaining mobility - then we might have evolved an off-switch where our body stops storing fat. Or not, because such an off-switch might compromise fat-storage too much and thus not be worth it.

Apply the same principle to emotions. You have a beneficial mechanism which, when used too much, is disadvantageous. However it rarely gets used too much, so there is no evolutionary pressure to develop an off-switch. Furthermore that off-switch might not even be feasible because it would compromise the beneficial function.

[PeZook]

Step 3. We are social animals. That same urge to protect someone also makes us get psychologically fucked up if we see someone torn to shreds by a land mine.

Don't forget that we are social animals, and thus killing others of our species is actually really stressful,even if we actually hate the victim.

For example, most Resistance assassins would develpo PTSD after WW2, even though their victims were scumbag Nazis of the worst sort. It's also the reason why we strive so much to sanitize lawful executions, to let the executioners distance themselves from it (the famous "one rifle is loaded with a wooden bullet" issue)

The reason why evolutionary pressures select for resistance to killing our own species is, of course, obvious.

[Singular Intellect]

Seems pretty obvious to me. Sadness would be a strong emotional response to something like losing offspring, thus motivating behavior to avoid such sadness in the future which increases the chances of future offspring survival.

[Lord Revan]

Seems pretty obvious to me. Sadness would be a strong emotional response to something like losing offspring, thus motivating behavior to avoid such sadness in the future which increases the chances of future offspring survival.

problem is that we've distanced ourselves from the rest of nature due to our egos and only recently we've started to think about humans as just one animal that's part of the whole, rather the lords and masters of all flora and fauna and wholy seperate of it. Thus thinking these things from evolutionary Point of view is still somewhat new to humankind.