Welcome to the EvoS Consortium!

I had been intending to do a post on phobias for a few weeks, when fellow EvoS Blogger Kaitlyn Andersen came in and scooped me on it. For reasons mentioned by Kaitlyn, the area of phobias is one very obvious application of evolutionary thought into clinical psychology. Let me recap very quickly here.

In lab experiments, humans (and monkeys) tend to acquire fear reactions to certain stimuli more readily than to others. Which stimuli are we most prone to fear? Those which would have been threatening in the natural environment of our ancestors (human and pre-human). The notion, of course, is that a predisposition to fear (and thus avoid) certain classes of stimuli can become evolutionarily selected for if those stimuli can kill you. Think of venomous and predatory animals (snakes, spiders, wild dogs) and situations like being dangerously high off the ground.

Not surprisingly, phobias of these flavors are the most commonly presented in clinical settings. Over many generations of evolutionary time, we have become “biologically prepared” to fear stimuli that were dangerous for our ancestors. However, crucially, our complex cognitive systems have not had time to evolve biological preparedness to fear things which are truly harmful in this day and age. Phobias of guns, knives, fast-moving cars, electrical sockets, corrosive acids, cocaine, and Luther Burgers would save a lot of lives if we had them, but such phobias are in fact quite rare. Maybe after another 100,000 years, people who tended to react phobically to such stimuli will have left more offspring, all of whom will be biologically prepared to fear these modern dangers.

Okay, so that’s all very Psych 101. But what about all those other phobias you read about in the Fun Facts on the back of cereal boxes? Ones like arachibutyrophobia (fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth), bufonophobia (fear of toads), coulrophobia (fears of clowns—a relatively common one, actually), or metrophobia (fear of poetry)? As has been pointed out by smarter people than I, most of these tend to be rare, idiosyncratic, or virtually nonexistent. So many of them exist (in lists like this) because it’s fun for linguaphiles to coin and compile them.

But notice I said virtually nonexistent. Some people still have reactions to (often completely non-threatening) random stimuli that could be classified as phobic, contra some claims that only biologically prepared stimuli can be phobically conditioned. How? Why? Perhaps the answer is that we have two separate phobia systems. We are “biologically prepared” to fear certain objects/animals/situations that were dangerous to our ancestors. But we can acquire conditioned responses to novel stimuli as well, and this may be thought of as a second way that we form phobias. It is a fairly efficiently designed system, after all: program the organism to fear stimuli that were recurrently present and dangerous in the past, but also allow it to form new fear associations to any particular stimuli which are paired, during the organism’s life, with a profoundly negative experience.

So does this two-mechanism system, and the predictions thereof, accurately describe the diversity of clinical phobic responses?

And also: geniphobia – fear of chins.

I have to admit I’m like every other girl out there who has a fear of spiders and snakes. I walk in a wooded area at a state park in Westchester County with my dog on a daily basis and occasionally I will come across a small snake or a disgusting spider. You can pretty much count on the fact that once I have spotted the scary creature (that I am absolutely sure will get me even though I am substantially bigger than it is), I will start running away doing “high knees” and screaming. As you can probably imagine, I look pretty ridiculous doing this and I do feel quite embarrassed after the fact, but this does not stop me from doing it every single time I encounter one. Interestingly enough, I have never been bitten by a snake nor had a terrible reaction to a spider bite, so why do I get so scared? Has evolution primed me to have this reaction? I believe that it has.

It is clear that emotions play a very big part in our lives. We are constantly having different emotional reactions to events and it would be weird to think of a life without emotions (I personally think that it would be very boring).  So where did emotions come from? Some researchers have proposed that emotions came to be because of adaptations. This means that they believe that emotions have some basis in our genes and the genes that cause us to experience emotions started out as a random mutation. Individuals who had emotions had more offspring than those who did not and this caused it to become typical of the whole population (Shiota & Kalat 2007). This seems like a good explanation for why we have emotions, but it still does not answer why I have an inborn fear of snakes and spiders, without having experienced a traumatic event with either of them.

A very interesting study was done that tried to explain just that.  In order to understand the study we first have to understand the preparedness concept. This concept means that we are biologically prepared to learn certain associations more easily than others. Arne Ohman did a study testing the preparedness concept. The test was to see if humans are more likely to associate fear with snakes or houses (neutral stimuli) after being classically conditioned (lightly shocked) to fear both. The result was that only one pairing was needed of the shock and the pictures of the snakes to create fear of the snakes. On the other hand, not even five pairings of the houses and the shock could create fear for houses (Ohman 2009). This shows that humans are biologically wired to fear certain stimuli over others. “…the fears of individuals diagnosed with phobias reflect evolutionarily prepared learning to fear events and situations that have provided survival threats in an evolutionary rather than in a contemporary perspective. Thus, there are phobias for snakes and other threatening animals…” (Ohman 2009). It is adaptive for me to be scared of spiders and snakes. I fear both spiders and snakes which causes me to stay far away from them so that I do not get hurt (or worse case scenario killed) by them.

I have to thank evolution for this adaptation because without emotions, especially fear, I’m sure that I would get myself in some sticky situations that would probably not end well for me.

Ohman, Arne. “Of Snakes and Faces: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Psychology of Fear.” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 50.6 (2009): 543-52. Print.

Shiota, Michelle N., and James W. Kalat. Emotion. Australia: Wadsworth, 2012. Print.

In a follow-up to Tuesday’s post, the results are in, and Mayor Lisa Wong of Fitchburg, MA was elected to a third term, defeating Joseph Solomito with 56% of the vote. Not at all what I predicted, but I think it makes the full chronology quite compelling. Here we see, in September, an outpouring of support for one candidate, who then is beaten soundly on Election Day. How does this make any sense?

But let’s look a little closer at what the two candidates were running on. There’s a sense in which we want to be drawn to our leaders, for them to be magnetic in a visceral way. Social psychologists have ample evidence that we are more likely to select as a leader someone who is more attractive, has a more authoritative voice, or has mannerisms that indicate dominance. These characteristics convince us that an individual will make the right decisions, and will be able to convince others to agree with them. This last part is important, because any policy decision must be embraced by everyone. On the other hand, we have an antenna for good decisions. We want someone who will make decisions we agree with, and decisions that we think will be good for our community. The hope is that the two come hand-in-hand, but they might not.

Municipal politics are a wonderful forum for looking at this balance because geographically local leaders emerge from their own populace. They are connected with the community, and know a sizable percentage of the local residents. For example, Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston has purportedly shaken the hand of over 50% of the city’s residents. Admittedly, he is on the extreme end of this scale, but that that is even possible (compare that to the percentage of Americans Obama knows), says volumes about how closely connected the mayor of a small city could be to his or her constituents. Through common friends and acquaintances, the mayor could easily be just a few degrees from nearly the entire city. This leader might be chosen in an almost personal way, rather than the more institutional, distant feeling of national politics. Thus, the mannerisms and appearances of candidates in day-to-day life can impact a vote as much as how they carry themselves in official capacities.

The case of Mayor Wong vs. Councilman Solomito provides an example of when the leader who has emerged from the population itself is not the person with the best plan for the community. Councilman Solomito has probably conducted business with the other influential businessmen and women, and been a fixture of the courts for years, consistently mentioned in the local newspaper, and a household name. He is truly of Fitchburg, and one of a network that reflects the institutions of the community. His success in the primary means that the people who were more attracted to this set of credentials were out in droves.

On the other hand, Mayor Wong is articulate as a speaker, motivating as a role model, and has shown that she has an effective vision for managing the city’s important decisions. This vision seems, by comparison, superior to that Solomito and his colleagues implemented for the previous thirty years. In this case, the majority of the voting populace in Fitchburg, MA preferred Wong.

Lisa Wong is the mayor of Fitchburg, MA. Just over 30 years old, her story is an inspiring one. Born to Chinese immigrants in northeastern Massachusetts, she was valedictorian of her high school class, whizzed through Boston University, and by her mid-20’s was the director of the Fitchburg Redevelopment Authority (the agency responsible for regulating and organizing economic development in the city). In 2007, at age 28, she became the first Asian-American woman to be elected mayor of a Massachusetts municipality.

At the time of Wong’s election, Fitchburg was struggling. Decades of cronyist politics had left the city’s coffers empty. Wong took rapid action, turning off selected street lights to save on electricity costs, and shortening the hours of some public institutions, notably the library. She went beyond austerity measures, however, instating monthly “First Thursday” celebrations that brought more shoppers downtown, and used her experience at the Redevelopment Authority to strategically promote economic growth. Savings and growth combined, the city’s rainy day fund has ballooned from $10,000 when she entered office, to $3 million today.

She has also worked to instill a Tocqueville-style democracy, encouraging citizens to come forward with concerns and requests. Her “Mayor of Your Street” program institutionalizes this spirit, empowering residents to bring hyper-local needs, like potholes and downed street signs, to the attention of the government. In her spare time—hard to believe there is any—she has held workshops that teach people how to become involved in politics.

Despite these successes, it appears likely that Mayor Wong will lose her job today. She is up for reelection, and was trounced in a primary this September. The challenger, Joseph Solomito, is a long-time lawyer and legislator in the town, and derives his support from the old guard that Wong ousted in 2007. They argue that the austerity measures have gone too far; that the library should be opened, and street lights turned back on. After this objection, however, their remaining arguments against Wong are, as the Boston Globe pointed out last week (“Groundbreaking Mayor Losing Favor,” 10/31/11), somewhat more personal than substantive. They say she’s arrogant, a condescending carpetbagger. Some even hint that she in fact lives in another town, and not in the Fitchburg house she owns.

As with everything on this blog, this is not just a tale about local politics, but also one with clear evolutionary roots. To spell this out, however, it is necessary to look at legislators not as the caricatures we call politicians, but as the function they fill for a community. They are chosen, whether democratically or otherwise, and have been vested with the authority to make decisions for the group. In other words, they have been entrusted with the power of legislation and public influence, that they might steer the group towards prosperity.

The key word here is “trust.” Trust is a social emotion. It is not usually based on pragmatic reasoning, nor does it make sense that it would. We decide whether we trust people based on a variety of cues, but we are most persuaded when we believe the other person is just like us, is part of our in-group, and thus can be expected to have the group’s best interests at heart. An outsider selling salvation is nothing but a con-man to this worldview, and it may be difficult to overcome such skepticism, even with results. One of Wong’s harshest critics on the city council, for example, recently stated that, “Once her term ends…she’s not going to stick around this city.” They conveniently ignore the successes that have occurred during her tenure, instead attacking her as an opportunist, an outsider, and a technocrat. As shallow as this rhetoric might seem, it has caught the attention of Fitchburg voters.

Simply put, we do not want to be ruled by people who are not our own. Even if an outsider makes good on promises to transform the community, there’s an inherent distrust. We would rather have our leaders be organic, individuals who have emerged from our own ranks, noted for their intelligence, charisma, and persuasion. In Fitchburg, that means returning to the same folks who were poor enough custodians that they led the city to the brink of bankruptcy. Nonetheless, I suspect that they will prevail in today’s contest. Mayor Wong’s ingenuity and talent are impressive, but they will not measure up to her opponent’s relatively simple appeal of being “one of us.”

“The great tragedy of Science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.“

Thomas H. Huxley (1825 – 1895)

English biologist; supporter of Darwin;
father of Aldous & Julian Huxley.

Missed Opportunities

In the lead up to this, the 200th anniversary year of Darwin’s birth, I’ve attended my fair share of evolutionary research seminars. Surprisingly, few presented alternative hypotheses, or better yet, multiple alternative hypotheses. In fact, rarely was a specific evolutionary hypothesis enunciated. And when one was, the speaker usually failed to point out what critical experiment or observation could falsify it. Admittedly, these talks were directed toward a general, non-specialist audience. But many of those in attendance were students and this “omission” seemed like a missed didactic opportunity. Moreover, Evolutionary Theory is championed (all too often in courthouses in the United States) as a true science (as opposed to Creation “science”) because its hypotheses are falsifiable. So where are all these falsifiable hypotheses????

My undergraduate Invertebrate Zoology professor, Demerest Davenport emphasized (i.e. drummed it into our skulls) that adaptive questions can be addressed using “Strong Inference”. He had us all read the 1964 SCIENCE article of that name, by John R Platt1. At the time I was not especially impressed because it sounded like what we had been taught in General Biology and General Chemistry and had already accepted as standard operating procedure. In his recent blog, Massimo Pigliucci2 suggests that the main point of Platt’s article was to explain why the “soft sciences” (including the evolutionary sciences) were less successful than the new (at the time) “hard sciences” like molecular biology and modern physics. I am not sure I agree with Pigliucci’s hard- vs soft-science dichotomy (perhaps that is a discussion for a later blog). In any case, as a young scientist, my take home message was that “Strong Inference” could be applied to all kinds of questions and that it should have been applied more often than it had. Perhaps, that is still so today.

Strong Inference

“In its separate element, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly:

1) Devising alternative hypotheses;

2) Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly as possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses;

3) Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result;

1′) Recycling the procedure, making sub-hypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain; and so on.”1

The advantage of testing a main hypothesis against multiple, alternative hypotheses is that it protects the scientist against what T.C. Chamberlin called over “affection for his intellectual child”:

“The moment one has offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems satisfactory, that moment affection for his intellectual child springs into existence and as the explanation grows into a definite theory his parental affections cluster about his offspring and grows more and more dear to him….There springs up also unwittingly a pressing of the theory to make it fit the facts and a pressing of the facts to make them fit the theory….”1

A Beautiful Hypothesis

Dr Stephen Colbert (Hon DFA) has pointed out, sometimes you have to think with your gut. And evolutionary theory can generate some great gut-worthy hypotheses that simply “feel” right. Here is an example: You all know “Why” the giraffe has a long neck? As long ago as Lamarck, the explanation has been “to get to the top of the acacia tree to reach the tender, most nutritious leaves’” Darwin and Lamarck may have differed in their notion of “How” the giraffe acquired its long neck but they would have agreed that it was advantageous in competing for food. We’ll call this the Interspecific Foraging Competition Hypothesis (IFCH). Soon after Darwin and Wallace proposed Natural Selection theory, the IFCH had become the accepted explanation for the giraffe’s long neck.

Now you have to admit that the IFCH is a beautiful hypothesis. It just feels right (sensu “Truthiness”). It just makes sense. It fits (with Darwinian natural selection).

Why ruin it by testing it?

An Ugly Fact

Why? Because there might be a better explanation. One obvious test of IFCH is to determine how giraffes actually USE their neck? In 1996, Robert Simmons and Lue Scheepers decided to do just that, and in their review of the literature, Simmons and Scheepers found that giraffes don’t use their neck in a way consistent with the IFCH — they tend to spend most of their time foraging at about shoulder height even when food is scarce and competition high. Now you could attempt to “save” the beautiful hypothesis by special pleading, or by suggesting that all of the many studies cited by Simmons and Scheepers “missed” something. Of course, then you would be reduced to simply refuting ugly facts. However, if there were plausible alternative hypotheses, then those could be explored and perhaps we can reject the IFCH without feeling empty-handed. The irony of the story of the giraffe’s long neck is that Darwin had developed another theory (Sexual Selection Theory) that could have been used to generate plausible alternative hypotheses to IFCH (although he didn’t know it at the time, he came close when he recognized that male giraffes use their long necks to swing their heavy skulls and stubby horns as weapons). But the rest of Simmons and Scheepers story will have to wait until next time.

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Tom Nolen is an evolutionary biologist with an interest in sexual selection, as well as the neural basis of communication and sensory function. He is the chair of the Department of Biology at SUNY New Paltz and a founding member of the EVoS program there. While he mostly studies insects, snails and jellyfish, he has been known to observe the occasional Hominin, being one himself.

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Citations (Read these before posting comments –start by Googling the authors)

1. Platt, JR (1964). Strong Inference: Certain systematic methods of scientific thinking may produce much more rapid progress than others. SCIENCE 146(3642), pp: 347-353.
2. Pigliucci, M (2009). Strong Inference And The Distinction Between Soft And Hard Science. http://www.scientificblogging.com/rationally_speaking/strong_inference_and_distinction_between_soft_and_hard_science cited on the web, May 31, 2009.
3. Chamberlin, TC, cited in Platt (1964) above.
4. Simmons, R and Scheepers, L (1996). Winning by a neck. Sexual selection in the evolution of giraffe. American Naturalist. 148(5), pp: 771-786.

You can tell an academic discipline is in its infancy when there are ten times as many names for it as there are graduate programs dedicated to its study. Such is the case with evolutionary clinical psychology…or should that be clinical evolutionary psychology? This burgeoning new field, in addition to having a plethora of monikers, consists of many theoretical approaches — each looking at evolutionary clinical phenomena from different angles — which will hopefully be integrated one day into a cohesive whole: evolutionary psychopathology! Or maybe it should be called evolutionary psychiatry….

If my hand had three additional fingers, I could count on one hand the number of individuals I’ve spoken to who are specifically interested in evolutionary approaches to clinical psychology. Yet, there are hundreds of researchers who have published articles that could fall under the banner of Darwinian psychiatry…or Darwinian psychopathology, if you prefer (okay, almost nobody calls it “Darwinian psychopathology,” and it’s probably best if we keep it that way, considering the current glut of labels). Research in this field, rich in its potential to explain and help treat some of humanity’s most intractable problems, is growing steadily but still relatively rare; quite new yet as old as the discovery of evolution itself. I’ll show you what I mean.

Not long after Darwin published Origin, he was already applying his new theory to clinical psychology and the emotions (as in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals). Following in his stead, generations of Social Darwinists and eugenicists viewed “insanity” as resulting from feeble genes that should be fished out of the gene pool and discarded via coerced selective breeding and sterilization; that wasn’t quite what Darwin had in mind, but one can only assume they meant well.

Evolutionary approaches to psychiatry next appeared in the work of Freud and Jung. Although a great many of his ideas are now seen as directly contradictory to evolutionary theory (I’m looking at you, Oedipal Complex), Freud was quite evolution-minded in the formation of his psychosexual stages, complexes, defense mechanisms, and the rest. Carl Jung likewise was an evolutionist, and this can be seen in his concept of “archetypes,” inborn mental concepts which he viewed as evolved psychological “organs” present in all humans from birth. If this sounds a lot like the mental modules posited by cognitive evolutionary psychology, well, it’s not – the archetypes weren’t considered to be functionally specific in the same way that modules are, and they had fantastic names like the Animus and the Shadow – but in positing universal, evolved mental organs (as opposed to conceiving of the mind as a blank slate), Jung was somewhat ahead of his time.

By the time Jung was old, Behaviorism had become the dominant paradigm in the field of psychology, and so animal models were all the rage. After several decades of watching non-human animals do funny things in cages, researchers were ready to try to reintroduce evolution and clinical psychology. Ethological Psychiatry: Psychopathology in the Context of Evolutionary Biology by McGuire & Fairbanks (1977) was the result. This movement was the most rigorous attempt yet at understanding human psychopathology from an evolutionary perspective; behaviors were observed in animals that were analogous to conditions like depression, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and so on. This allowed researchers to extrapolate to humans and theorize that we shared some of these neural pathways with our non-human cousins, and that our mental illnesses might best be conceptualized as etiologically similar to theirs.

While this enlightening work was being done in animal labs all around the world, therapists were also incorporating evolutionary thought into their treatments, with varying degrees of success, in more direct ways than Freud and Jung had. These efforts ranged from quaint references to the “triune brain” to more modern and stringent attempts examine patients’ clinical issues from an integrated evolutionary context, as in the excellent and oft-overlooked Exiles from Eden: Psychotherapy from an Evolutionary Perspective by Glantz and Pearce (1989). These perspectives (known as evolutionary psychotherapy, sociobiological psychiatry, clinical sociobiology, or any of the other labels floating around these paragraphs) are subject to interpretation by individual practitioners, but generally involve implicitly or explicitly comparing patients’ behavior to the normative set of behaviors that our hunter gatherer ancestors would have engaged in. A therapist utilizing this approach might, for example, validate a husband’s sexual jealousy by emphasizing its biological utility, in attempts to help him overcome it. For more information, see the Psychology Today blog Neanderthink by Nando Pelusi, a clinician who uses evolutionary perspectives in his practice.

And that leads us to the modern era of – let’s call it evolutionary clinical psychology, which is sufficiently descriptive, inclusive (not all of these perspectives utilize Darwinian selection, for example), and sidesteps whatever controversy may surface through the use of the word “sociobiology.” (As an aside, it seems that many in the younger generation of evolutionists, to which I belong, are puzzled yet intrigued by the pervasive insinuations that some very dark Incident happened with the field of sociobiology, something unspeakable which has tainted the word to this day. To us, sociobiology is the foundation of evolutionary psychology, and to even hear that there is controversy surrounding it seems, somehow, quaint and a little bit spooky.)

The current discipline, in its most inclusive construal, exists at the junction between evolutionary psychology and evolutionary medicine, and includes all of the approaches mentioned above (with the general exception of some of the dustier psychodynamic theories). Taken as a whole, the breadth of literature within the modern field of evolutionary clinical psychology seeks to understand, classify, and treat mental disorders and other clinical phenomenon using the tools and perspectives of evolution: adaptation, function, natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, phylogeny, mismatch theory, and so on.

It is this “writ large” definition of evolutionary clinical psychology that will be the focus (or lack thereof) of this blog. Bookmark me, and check back often!

What is sibling rivalry? Anyone who has brothers or sisters, or more than one child, has a definition for what sibling rivalry is. Put simply, it is when children fight with one another. When I was younger, my brother and I were constantly fighting, over literally everything. We are four years apart so that is to be expected. My sister and I, on the other hand, did not fight very often. She is thirteen years older than I am. This got me thinking: why did my brother and I fight, but my sister and I did not? Does sibling rivalry have limits? Let’s get a better understanding of what sibling rivalry is and why it occurs to try and answer this question.

Sibling rivalry is when siblings are competitive against each other which often leads to fighting with one another. It occurs when siblings demand more resources than they are currently receiving. In humans, resources can include many different things like food, money and attention. Regardless of what it is, they feel that they are not getting enough of it so they must fight with their sibling to gain more than they already have. Sibling rivalry happens in many species, especially K-selected species. K-selected species have small litters, slow maturation, and high parental investment (Workman & Reader, 2004). They are more likely to have sibling rivalry because they are more dependent on their parents for resources. Sibling rivalry can take many forms, with the most extreme form being siblicide.

Siblings share about half of each other’s genes. Looking at this from an evolutionary standpoint, we would assume that siblings would not fight because they are wired to love and look out for one another. However, when resources are low, it is adaptive to be selfish and fight for those resources. This leaves siblings dealing with the lifeboat dilemma. The siblings must ask themselves, should I keep all the resources for myself or should I share them with my sibling? Parents often have more offspring than they have resources for. Keep in mind, that resources do not need to be tangible things, they can be something as simple as time to spend with the child. This means that children have to fight for these limited resources.

An example of sibling rivalry can be found among dogs when they are puppies. The size of a litter can range dramatically between different breeds; however, usually a dog will have more than one puppy. When puppies are born they depend on their mother for a lot of their needs, especially for food. Puppies must nurse from their mother for at least a month after birth. Her milk is full of nutrients that help the puppies grow. Sibling rivalry can happen while puppies are nursing. If the dog has a large litter she may not have enough nipples to feed all the puppies at once. This means that the puppies are competitive against each other to be fed and often push their siblings away so that they can eat first. Sibling rivalry occurs in this situation because there are limited resources.

Sibling rivalry is apparent in many other species and can often lead to siblicide if conditions call for it. Siblicide is when a sibling kills their brother or sister. “If resources turn out to be inadequate for all nursery mates to survive, then sibling rivalry can escalate to lethal extremes” (Mock, 2005).  It has been observed in many bird species (Sulloway, 1997). This occurs with the blue-footed boobie, a small bird. Most chicks within this species have siblings that they are competing for resources with because usually two or three chicks hatch at a time. If the oldest sibling drops 80% below its normal weight because of food shortages, it will peck it’s sibling to death. “In experimental studies in which the necks of booby chicks have been taped to prevent them from ingesting food, aggression increases sharply and is especially pronounced in the elder chick” (Sulloway, 1997). Think back to the lifeboat dilemma, the oldest blue-footed boobie is being selfish and keeping all the resources for himself by killing his sibling. The birds know that if the siblings share the food neither of them will survive because there is not enough for both of them so one takes it upon himself to kill the other. The parents of these birds have little control over this. They must accept it because they need to protect at least one of their investments so that they have reproductive success and pass down their genes. This is a very extreme example of sibling rivalry because it includes siblicide.

So now let’s see if we can answer the question I posed earlier in this discussion. I personally believe that I did not fight with my sister very much because of the age difference. When I was born, she was thirteen years old. She was not in need of the same resources that I was in need of so she did not need to worry so much about me stealing resources from her. She was also becoming more mature as she was getting older and she had more autonomy. She could use different outlets to get what she needed.

My brother and I, on the other hand, are a lot closer in age. He was four years old when I was born. He was still very dependent on my parents. This creates a situation where sibling rivalry could and did occur. My mother told me that at times my brother wanted to send me back. He was not happy that I was taking up so much of my parent’s time and resources and this was one of the ways that he was expressing that. This can be related to siblicide, but on a much less extreme level (thankfully for me!). My brother felt threatened that he was not going to get everything that he needed, so he wanted me gone.

When I think about sibling rivalry on a deeper level, I realize that there probably was sibling rivalry between my sister and I; it was just different than what my brother and I were experiencing so it was not as obvious. She probably was as upset about my needing my parent’s resources as my brother was, but she expressed it in a different way. My brother and I physically fought. My sister could not physically fight with me because she was a lot older and that would not be appropriate. She probably fought with me in a different way. When I was older and able to walk and talk, she may have teased me about certain things. This was her way of fighting with me that was more appropriate for her age. Therefore, sibling rivalry can happen regardless of the age difference between the children.

Luckily, I’ve made it this far and neither of my siblings has tried to take my life. Now that we are older we are all good friends; who would have thought!

Mock, D. (2005). Sibling Rivalry. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc.

Sulloway, F. (1997). Birth Order, Sibling Competition, and Human Behavior. Retrieved from http://www.sulloway.org/Holcomb.pdf

Workman, L., & Reader, W. (2004). Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

On a recent visit to New Hampshire, my brother’s family took me and my near-3-year-old son on a trip to Story Land. As the name implies, this amusement park was designed for young children and the rides, while thrilling to a 3-year-old, might not be as thrilling to a 30-year-old. Which was fine with me. The last time I went to an amusement park I went on one of those roller coasters where your legs dangle below you as you are lifted up something like 5 stories before plummeting down. After not dying (though my physiology was sure I had) I asked myself why it is I ever enjoyed roller coasters in the first place. In other words, I was officially old.

Fast forward 10 years and my son is asking to ride the kiddie coaster at Story Land; I certainly couldn’t begrudge him the experience. I thought he was a little young, but once my 7-year-old nephew signed on, that was just too much temptation. As we zig-zagged down the hill, my son slid from one end of the seat to the other, the distance matched only by the size of his grin. He hardly cracks a smile when riding the carousel, and here he rode the roller coaster with no fear.

My son is not unique among children in his newly acquired thrill seeking adventurousness. Sure, there are individual differences, but there is a pattern in development of first easily acquired fears in infancy (such as of heights, as shown in the Visual Cliff study) followed in childhood by a yearning for stimuli that were previously feared, that a child is now capable of mastering. And with mastery of risky elements comes exhilaration – and the ability to overcome anxiety. At least, that is what a recent article by Sandseter and Kennair (2011) posits. Risky play allows children to learn to cope with commonly experienced fearful stimuli, in a relatively safe way.

For example, the categories of risky play include play at great heights, which brings the risk of falling and injury; and play at high speed, particularly uncontrolled and possibly leading to collision. As many parents of toddlers can attest, some majorly fun games early on include climbing on everything; jumping from a height; folding the kid upside down, quickly; and running fast (or pushing the stroller fast towards an obstacle). Try these games with a 5-month-old, and payback might not be pretty. Like hourly nighttime wakings for the foreseeable future. But for toddlers, such play seems to allow them to overcome anxiety. Further, they seem rooted in our past; risky play at heights decreases fear of heights later in life and risky play at high speed might be a vestige from mastering the ability to swing quickly through trees (see also recent blog post by Dan O’Brien).

The traditional wisdom and research on anxiety has conceived of the origins of anxiety from a learning perspective. Children learn associations between a potentially dangerous stimulus and the accompanying fear response. We might presume such associations need to be broken in an active way. This newer approach puts the everyday play of children in a more functional light. Children overcome fear and future anxiety by mastering skills related to feared stimuli. Avoiding the situation, such as heights, furthers anxiety down the road.

So the catch is that if risky play does indeed serve an anxiety-reducing function, by inhibiting risky play, are we producing kids who will likely have problems with anxiety in the future? The amount of protectiveness displayed by a caregiver is also subject to individual differences, but Sandseter and Kennair imply that in the Western world we might be limiting exposure to risky stimuli a bit too much. Or in other words, perhaps by de-hazarding play, we are setting our children up for anxiety.

Children engage in risky play for one reason: it is fun. It is up to caregivers to make sure the play is safe enough, and then let children go. The trick is overcoming our own fears when we are required to go along for the ride.

Reference:

Sandseter, E. B. H., & Kennair, L. E. O. (2011). Children’s risky play from an evolutionary perspective: The anti-phobic effects of thrilling experiences. Evolutionary Psychology, 9(2), 257-284.