High-risk activities in adolescence—unprotected sex, substance abuse, violence, and other forms of risky behavior—remain a pervasive and costly problem in Western societies, despite extensive efforts to prevent or reduce these activities through intervention programs.
An evolutionary perspective provides a fresh alternative to the mental health model. In particular, risky behaviors might reflect adaptations to harsh environments rather than deviations from optimal development.
The dominant scientific paradigm for explaining these high-risk behaviors can be termed the mental health model, which assumes (implicitly if not explicitly) that harsh social environments adversely affect children’s wellbeing, promoting disturbances in development, even if not clinical disorders per se. This model emphasizes the costs and largely ignores the benefits of risk-taking, making it difficult to explain the motives for risky behavior in adolescents.
An evolutionary perspective provides a fresh alternative to the mental health model. In particular, risky behaviors might reflect adaptations to harsh environments rather than deviations from optimal development. Central to this perspective is the concept of conditional adaptations: brain mechanisms that were shaped by natural selection to detect and respond to specific features of childhood environments and entrain patterns of development that reliably matched those features during a species’ evolutionary history. This line of thought was initiated by John Bowlby in the middle of the 20th century and now can be given a more sophisticated formulation based on modern evolutionary theory.
This project was initiated by Dr. Bruce J. Ellis, Professor of the Endowed Chair in Fathers, Parenting and Families, Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences, University of Arizona. Dr. Ellis was a participant in our childhood education workshop and was inspired to organize a comparable focus on risky adolescent behavior. The workshop will be held at the Norton School on October 31-November 2 and will feature the distinguished participants listed below. For a more detailed description of the workshop, please read the attached document titled Adolescent Risk Behaviors: The Need for an Evolutionary Analysis (PDF).
For all of our projects, we intend to create a large “community of interest” in addition to the participants who attend the workshop. Contact the directors if you wish to become a member of this community and receive periodic updates.
Selected articles are currently available here
Participants
Jay Belsky
Dr. Belsky is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues at Birkbeck College in London. (More…) He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of child development and family studies. His areas of special expertise include the effects of day care, parent-child relations during the infancy and early childhood years, the transition to parenthood, the etiology of child maltreatment, and the evolutionary basis of parent and child functioning. He is a founding and collaborating investigator on the NICHD Study of Child Care and Youth Development (US) and the National Evaluation of Sure Start (UK). (Hide)
Anthony Biglan
Dr. Biglan is a Senior Scientist at Oregon Research Institute, Director of the Center on Early Adolescence, and past President of the Society for Prevention Research. (More…) He has been doing research for the last 25 years on the prevention of adolescent problem behaviors, including numerous experimental evaluations of interventions to prevent tobacco, other drug use, high-risk sexual behavior, reading failure, and aggressive social behavior. He is author of Helping Adolescents at Risk (with P.A. Brennan, S.L. Foster, and H.D. Holder, Guildford 2003) and Changing Cultural Practices: A Contextualist Framework for Intervention Research (Context, 1995). (Hide)
Ronald Dahl
Dr. Dahl is the Staunton Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and the Medical Director of the Child and Adolescent Neurobehavioral Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. (More…) He is a pediatrician with considerable research interests in the areas of sleep/arousal and affect regulation and its relevance to development of behavioral and emotional disorders in children and adolescents. His work focuses on early adolescence and pubertal maturation as a developmental period with unique opportunities for early intervention in relation to a wide range of behavioral and emotional health problems. He has published extensively on adolescent development, sleep disorders, and behavioral/emotional health in children. (Hide)
Jacquelynne Eccles
Dr. Eccles is the Wilbert McKeachie Collegiate Professor of Psychology, Women’s Studies and Education, as well as a research scientist at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. (More…) Over the last 30 years, she has conducted research on a wide variety of topics including gender-role socialization, teacher expectancies, classroom influences on student motivation and social development in the family and school context. Her research interests include: family and school influences on development; development in high risk settings; development of self-esteem, activity preferences, and task choice; adolescent development; identity formation; transition into adulthood; biosocial influences and development; gender role development; and role of ethnicity in development and socialization. She is editor of the Journal of Research in Adolescence. (Hide)
Bruce Ellis, Organizer
Dr. Ellis is Professor of Family Studies and Human Development and the John & Doris Norton Endowed Chair in Fathers, Parenting, and Families at the University of Arizona. (More…) His research uses evolutionary theory as a framework for studying gene-environment interactions during development, especially with respect to sexual development and child stress reactivity. He employs a variety of methodologies, including descriptive longitudinal work, behavioral observation, laboratory assessment of biological reactivity to stressors, experimental manipulations, direct interviews, and questionnaire measures using self- and peer-reports. The overarching theoretical framework that organizes his research is Evolutionary Developmental Psychology, as outlined in his book co-authored with David Bjorklund titled Origins of the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Child Development. (Hide)
Dennis Embry
Dr. Embry is a scientist-entrepreneur who is president of PAXIS Institute in Tucson, AZ. (More…) His scholarly writing focuses on social change applied to large population-level change— integrating brain, behavioral, and evolutionary factors. He is a former National Research Advisory Council Senior Fellow in the Commonwealth, recipient of the science to practice award in 2006 by the Society for Prevention Research, and author of multiple manuals and training efforts for social change. He is currently preparing a new popular book and TV program for PBS entitled, “Youthanasia: How modern culture is slowly killing our youth and what can be done.”(Hide)
A. J. Figueredo
Dr. Figueredo is Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. (More…) He serves as Director of the graduate program in Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology (EEP), and is affiliated with the graduate programs in Program Evaluation and Research Methodology (PERM) and Psychology, Policy, and Law (PPL). Professor Figueredo’s major area of research interest is the evolutionary psychology and behavioral development of life history strategy, sex, and violence in human and nonhuman animals. He also studies the quantitative ethology and social development of insects, birds, and primates. (Hide)
Mark Flinn
Dr. Flinn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, Colombia. (More…) His research interests are in evolutionary human biology, behavior, and culture. Dr. Flinn’s current research efforts involve an ongoing 20-year study of childhood stress, family relationships, and health in a rural Caribbean community by longitudinal monitoring of hormone and immune function from saliva and urine samples, ethnographic observation of child activities and social environment, and medical histories, growth measures, and parasite exams. The purpose is to identify specific psychosocial causes and consequences of childhood stress. The project is the first to longitudinally investigate stress in a naturalistic setting using hormonal assays and quantitative behavioral observation techniques in addition to standard human biological, ethnographic, medical, and psychological methods. (Hide)
Patricia Hawley
Dr. Hawley is an Associate Professor in the Developmental and Social Psychology program at the University of Kansas. (More…) Her research focuses on the psychological underpinnings of human social power and social success. Dr. Hawley’s underlying evolutionary model (i.e., Resource Control Theory; Hawley, 1999) integrates work from various disciplines (e.g., developmental psychology, social psychology, peer relationships, and theoretical biology). As such, it challenges prevalent thought on aggression and social adaptation, as well as common assumptions about gender and social status. Current projects include investigations of morality, aggression, and the development of self-regulation. (Hide)
Anthony Volk
Dr. Volk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. (More…) He is the founder of the Volk Parenting Laboratory, which studies parent-child relationships from infants to adolescents. Dr. Volk’s overall interest is to gain an evolutionary, neurological, medical, cultural, social, and historical understanding of why parents do what they do. His research falls into two main categories: child facial cues and adolescent-parent relationships. This research also includes parental influence on adolescent’s health, antisocial, scholastic and/or bullying experiences. (Hide)
Carol Worthman
Dr. Worthman is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory for Comparative Human Biology at Emory University. (More…) Her work is unified by a focus on the biocultural interface. Her study topics have included causes and consequences of variation in maturation schedules, applications of life history theory, determinants of infant feeding and birth spacing, and variation in male life history and reproduction. Other areas, such as behavioral biology, arousal and attention regulation, developmental epidemiology (including of risk for psychiatric disorders), and comparative ecology of human sleep, are emerging areas of intensifying research and theorization. (Hide)
