Depression Reduces Capacity to Learn to Actively Avoid Aversive Events
20 comments
·September 17, 2025OgsyedIE
munificent
I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me.
Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware.
Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together. Otherwise, the non-depressed ones would capitalize the tribe's resource and everyone would still end up screwed. But depression doesn't seem to have that sort contagious social component. On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state. And while the depressed person is likely conveying a whole lot of negative sentiment, most aren't actively attempting to get the people around them to be depressed too. That's the last thing most depressed people want.
ivape
What if I tell you the depressed person is organically cut out and exiled from the group (they are isolated). Then you get a smaller group, which is easier to sustain. Doesn't have to be resource driven, as depressed states can shake up a group to maintain hierarchies that would otherwise be unmaintainable with more people in the tribe.
The implication here is that parts of the larger organism (tribe) know to sacrifice (those that enter the depressed state).
andoando
There is nothing about evolutionary theory that posits that all current biological structures/functions must have a evolutionary purpose.
Only the system as a whole must carry superior fitness, not each of its individual components. Given a sufficiently complex system, its rather expected that there will be negative, or even outright destructive functions that arise. You can certainly try to find a positive reason for why cancer, disease, death during conception, etc exist, but there is a much simpler explanation.
Depression in this view, isn't something outright that was adaptively constructed, but merely a side effect of how the mind works.
mothballed
I've often wondered if depression is exactly that, a system level optimization. Sometimes depression just happens, but sometimes it is triggered by low social status, realizing you've hurt someone in an unjustified or accidental way, having other mental illness, being seriously injured, or some other way that threatens the fitness of the overall group. Depression might be a (albeit flawed) system level way of reducing the amount of physical and social resources those people consume so that the non-depressed strata of society can better take them.
Note: this is a speculation, not assertions of fact
andoando
I think its just a natural consequence of our mind working on a positive-negative reward system, which I think its critical to any intelligence. Being manically positive is just as detrimental as being chronically depressed.
Its entirely normal to be negative, or to ignore stimuli, or decide not to do things. In some situations, say if you were trapped in a cage your whole life, you'd agree it'd be entirely normal to be depressed. It would make no sense to waste energy running around hitting iron bars that won't break.
In this sense, depression is somewhat of a social construct. We determine someone is depressed because we believe their reaction to the environment to not be normal.
Filligree
You’re proposing group selection, which always never happens.
Evolution functions not at the level of groups, or even individuals, but genes inside of individuals.
Most of the time thinking of it as group selection at the genetic level (=individuals) does work, fortunately.
OgsyedIE
Such phenotypes would fail to reproduce, leading to the genes for those phenotypes dying out.
bubblyworld
My understanding of the "modern" point of view is that selection acting at the level of the gene (not the organism or group) is sufficient as a theory. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype go into this stuff in a lot of detail.
Totally agree with your first sentence though. And even if there is a plausible adaptive function it may have only been adaptive in the past, or might be a side effect of some other adaptive function (see sickle cell anemia), or a host of other possibilities.
Consultant32452
The rule of thumb is if something has a cost and persists over time it must have some benefit even if we don’t understand what that is. Otherwise, creatures not paying the cost will outcompete over time.
thfuran
Or it’s caused by the same thing as something that does have a benefit.
crmd
This fits exactly with how depression feels to me, and appears to manifest itself in me behavior-wise, according to my partner. Def going to give this some thought. Thanks!
SamoyedFurFluff
Context: I dabbled in evolutionary biology at the university level, not enough for even a minor in the subject.
My understanding is the existence of selection does not necessarily mean every trait that exists right now has an evolutionary benefit. It is more coarse grained that anything that doesn’t prevent you from breeding is acceptable. Depressed people are not made infertile by their depression, so there will be a subset of depressed people (assuming depression even has a hereditary component). This doesn’t mean the trait of depression has an advantage in order to exist, it just isn’t so much of a disadvantage that it doesn’t exist.
schmidtleonard
"Depression stops ant whorls" is my favorite quick and snappy summary.
null
Wurdan
"These findings suggest that in young adults, depressive symptoms are associated with difficulty in overriding prepotent responses to actively avoid aversive outcomes in the absence of reward."
My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly?
As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated reward).
floatrock
Yep, a sentence only someone on tenure-track could love.
ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."
hopelite
[dead]
This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds.
In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until the food web productivity the group subsists on has returned to normality. Phenotypes which reduce activity across the board without making any changes to their distribution of activities, just hoping for things to get better on their own, are likely the phenotypes that are most successful at surviving to reproduce within conditions of intragroup strife when these infrequent disasters occur.
If this line of reasoning bears out to correctly describe the actual selection pressures that have led to the genes for depression evolving, it follows that what we call major depressive disorder is in fact the genome seeing and carrying out false positives for needing the famine-survival strategy.
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Incidentally, I first came across the theory I'm repeating here on Steven Byrne's neuroscience blog, if you want an avenue for finding sources.