Evolutionary Antecedents of Abnormal Personality

EVOLUTIONARY ANTECEDENTS OF ABNORMAL PERSONALITY IVOR JONES and BRETT A. DANIELS* Can human personality and personality disorders usefully be understood in evolutionary terms? Human personality and personality disorders are both complex and diverse and include aspects of cognition, affect, and behavior. The wide range of human personality variation makes it difficult for a single paper to cover all traits, but by using histrionic personality disorder as an example from which wader assertions about personality and personality disorders will be drawn, a discrete set of behaviors, central to the condition, can be defined. These behavioral aspects can be separated from affective and cognitive factors, and animal analogues are immediately apparent . A major conceptual problem is that while medical formulations of histrionic personality and related attention-seeking states pay much more attention to the clinical features of the state than to the social condition which elicits them [1-3], ethological observations usually put behavior fairly precisely within a particular social context. Indeed, much ethological data classifies behavior in terms of the social setting, e.g., courtship, agonistic , or territorial, and only secondarily in terms of behavioral patterns. In any comparison of human and nonhuman behavior, one is further limited by the physical and cognitive constraints present in each species. Social situations which are unique to man— those where speech and higher levels of cognition play a substantial part—cannot be examined directly in these analogies. It may also be that certain types ofbehavior could be physically performed by a species but that survival pressures constrict the behavioral repertoire by making it likely that certain behaviors will lead to death (e.g., excessively time-consuming displays reducing the ability to hunt for food) . Conversely, man may be protected to a degree from such fierce selection through the development of technology, by altruistic behavior, and by social support. In the current investigation of personality across different * Department of Psychiatry, University of Tasmania, 43 Collins Street, Hobart, TAS 7000, Australia.© 1996 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/96/3903-0939101.00 118 IvorJones and Brett A. Daniels ¦ Antecedents ofAbnormal Personality TABLE 1 DSM-IV Criteria for Histrionic Personality Disorder A pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following : 1 . Is uncomfortable in situations in which he or she is not the center of attention. 2.Interaction with others is characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behavior. 3.Displays rapidly shifting and shallow expression of emotions. 4.Consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention to self. 5.Has a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail. 6.Shows self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated expression of emotion. 7.Is suggestible, i.e., easily influenced by others or circumstances. 8.Considers relationships to be more intimate than they actually are. species these considerations will arise. Behavior will be examined in its social antecedents as well as its phenomenology. If aspects of personality do not have parallels in animal behavior, then we will try, within the evolutionary paradigm adopted here, to explain why this is the case. DSM-IV, the most recent American Psychiatric Association classification of psychiatric diseases, lists the features of histrionic personality disorder presented in Table 1 [4] . These criteria are similar to those of Chodoff and Lyons, who earlier summarized much of the contemporary literature [1] . They also included immaturity of behavior as a criterion for the histrionic personality, a feature still considered important in the histrionic personality by many clinicians. Here, and generally in psychiatric classifications of personality, the features of personality disorders are exaggerations in degree from normal behaviors, or they are behaviors performed in an inappropriate context. They are not, as is the case with some psychotic behaviors , of a different kind. The key issues which will be addressed are: 1.Are similar behaviors found in animals other than humans? 2.What adaptive values do these behaviors have in other animals, and is it reasonable to look for the same values in humans? 3.Where the trait is found in nonhuman species, is there individual variation in its expression, with some members of...