A Tower Unto Heaven: Toward an Expanded Framework for Psychopathology

Abstract

I respond to commentaries on my target article “An Evolutionary Life History Framework for Psychopathology.” I start by addressing criticism of my basic assumptions about life history strategies and their implications for individual differences in human behavior. Next, I examine the theoretical structure of the proposed framework and respond to the commentators’ challenges to its generality and flexibility. I show how the framework can be expanded to include multiple levels of analysis and to integrate behavioral control with neurological functionality; I also reinterpret the recent finding of a general factor of psychopathology in the context of the expanded framework. In the last section I discuss specific psychopathological conditions, namely attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder, substance abuse, autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia spectrum disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, and depression. For each condition, I reply to the commentators’ criticism of my life history analysis, integrate their suggestions and insights, highlight the present weaknesses of the theory, and indicate promising directions for future research.

Notes

¹ Searching Google Scholar for publications containing both “life history theory” and “fast–slow” or “pace of life” returned a steadily increasing number of publications from 1992–1994 (n = 6, or 1% of all publications containing the phrase “life history theory”) to 2010–2012 (n = 153, or 6% of all publication containing the phrase “life history theory”; search performed on April 21, 2014).