The evolved developmental niche in childhood: Relation to adult psychopathology and morality

ABSTRACT

Following prior work linking childhood experience to adult outcomes, we used an evolutionary framework to examine effects of childhood experience on adult psychopathology and morality. Every animal provides an early life developmental system, developmental manifold or “niche” for its young, a set of inherited extra-genetic characteristics that match up with the maturational schedule of the offspring to optimize development. Humans inherit a niche first shaped over 30 million years ago with the emergence of social mammals and modified through human evolution. The human “evolved developmental niche” (EDN) has been related to positive outcomes in young children. Using an adult sample (n = 606), we examined adult retrospective recollection of childhood EDN and its relation to attachment, psychopathology, sociomoral capacities, and ethical orientations. Significant direct and indirect effects were found through mediation models, with EDN predicting Social Engagement orientation through perspective taking, Social Opposition orientation through lack of perspective taking and Social Withdrawal orientation through personal distress.

Acknowledgments

We thank Ashley Lawrence for her assistance in collecting the data. We thank anonymous reviewers and the editor for their excellent suggestions.

Notes

¹Although we also asked about breastfeeding, there were too many people who could not remember (23.1%) or did not respond (51.6%); therefore, we did not include this variable in the analyses.

²This was an online study of an anonymous sample; our IRB does not support asking suicidality questions in those circumstances.

³If the findings from the mediation models were simply due to chance or due to Type I errors, we would expect about 5% of significant mediation results. In the mediation analyses, the number of mediation tests we did was 72. The proportion of significant mediation results was 33.3%. There were nine combinations of moral capacities (empathy, perspective taking, and personal distress) and ethical orientations (engagement, social opposition, and social withdrawal) for the mediation analyses. The significant mediation effects were found in three combinations: perspective taking with engagement, perspective taking with social opposition, and personal distress with social withdrawal. For the other six combinations, none of the mediation effects were significant.

Moreover if the findings were due to chance, there would not be any pattern in the significant findings. The findings from the mediation models work for both all of the individual EDN variables and the composite EDN variable, not just for one or two randomly selected EDN variables. Therefore, we are confident that the findings are not due to chance or Type I errors.

⁴Health outcomes for people under age 50 in the United States are among the worst in a 17-member developed-nation comparison and have been trending downward for decades and there is little understanding of its cause (National Research Council, 2013). The report notes, for example, that the USA has higher rates of chronic disease and mortality among adults, regardless of wealth and there are higher rates of injuries and untimely death among adolescents and small children. Although the National Research Council (2013) report did not draw any conclusions about the sources for American’s health disadvantage, early life experiences are implicated.