Given my own experience with depression, it makes some amount of intuitive sense. For me at least, "sadness" is not wrong, but other than that it doesn't describe the experience very well at all.
When I'm really down, I can't bring myself to care about "aversive events". I might even welcome them a little bit, both because they fit my understanding better (everything is proceeding as it should be, this ant eating my flesh makes sense) and because it's an opportunity to feel something at least. For me anyway, depression is more about absence of affect than feeling "sad", and ironically it is maddening (and yet, in a sense I can't bring myself to care.)
Then again, my explanation suggests that depressed people ought to be better at avoiding harm through inaction, and I didn't see that in the abstract?
Another hypothesis is that you could stop at "Depression Reduces Capacity to Learn". It feels like all mental processing is muted, and especially any forms of change. I guess you could do a study where you have to learn to actively prevent an aversive event for someone else. But the 1st hypothesis may still apply: depressed people may still care less about harm to someone else (than if they were not depressed). But at least you could separate out whether it's only because depressed people don't care what happens to themselves.
I experience depression as an autonomous shutdown, under great mental weight.
The ability to make any mental and physical effort is greatly reduced to "depressed" levels.
It is the subconscious version of a situation where you need to climb out of a pit, but the walls are perfectly flat and oiled. Even though you need to get out of the pit, instead of scrambling, you just sit down.
The situation may not really be like that, but some deep cognitive machinery has concluded that it is.
It isn't anything like sadness. Although sadness could be part or proximate cause of a particular depressive episode, it is neither a necessary or sufficient condition.
--
I do believe depression has a real purpose. To turn off motivated but misdirected behavior, and force us to perform a reset of deeply held assumptions, expectations and motivations.
Pain effectively changes our expectations and behavior in the moment. Depression is like pain for complex situations. It forces major change, by disabling our current ineffective directives and giving us "time out" to slowly rewire. Until the subconscious believes we have found a new mental path, more aligned with reality, and lets motivation flow again.
But like battle surgery, it is a blunt instrument for doing something profound, and may inflict damage as well as repair it.
And when life circumstances don't let us take the pause and rest our brain is trying to enforce, it is a bit of living hell.
I agree, sadness is not how I would describe depression. It's more like... a deep sense of apathy, emptiness and hopelessness with no apparent cause or end in sight.
Of course that mental state would hinder learning, you're missing all the brain signals and reward feedback to care about anything.
The authors take a leap in assuming there's a difficulty with overriding a response. But in my and others' experience from group therapy, I can confidently say it's more like either apathy or being numbed out, to the point of either not noticing or caring that the aversive sound is happening.
This is how SSRI has felt for me also, incidentally: an even deeper apathy, setting in from lack of any emotion at all.
This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds.
In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until the food web productivity the group subsists on has returned to normality. Phenotypes which reduce activity across the board without making any changes to their distribution of activities, just hoping for things to get better on their own, are likely the phenotypes that are most successful at surviving to reproduce within conditions of intragroup strife when these infrequent disasters occur.
If this line of reasoning bears out to correctly describe the actual selection pressures that have led to the genes for depression evolving, it follows that what we call major depressive disorder is in fact the genome seeing and carrying out false positives for needing the famine-survival strategy.
.
Incidentally, I first came across the theory I'm repeating here on Steven Byrne's neuroscience blog, if you want an avenue for finding sources.
I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me.
Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware.
Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together. Otherwise, the non-depressed ones would capitalize the tribe's resource and everyone would still end up screwed. But depression doesn't seem to have that sort contagious social component. On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state. And while the depressed person is likely conveying a whole lot of negative sentiment, most aren't actively attempting to get the people around them to be depressed too. That's the last thing most depressed people want.
There is nothing about evolutionary theory that posits that all current biological structures/functions must have a evolutionary purpose.
Only the system as a whole must carry superior fitness, not each of its individual components. Given a sufficiently complex system, its rather expected that there will be negative, or even outright destructive functions that arise. You can certainly try to find a positive reason for why cancer, disease, death during conception, etc exist, but there is a much simpler explanation.
Depression in this view, isn't something outright that was adaptively constructed, but merely a side effect of how the mind works.
Context: I dabbled in evolutionary biology at the university level, not enough for even a minor in the subject.
My understanding is the existence of selection does not necessarily mean every trait that exists right now has an evolutionary benefit. It is more coarse grained that anything that doesn’t prevent you from breeding is acceptable. Depressed people are not made infertile by their depression, so there will be a subset of depressed people (assuming depression even has a hereditary component). This doesn’t mean the trait of depression has an advantage in order to exist, it just isn’t so much of a disadvantage that it doesn’t exist.
> the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds
I remember from my days studying to be an actuary that the population that can best estimate mortality odds from the gut are actually the depressed. (Most of us tend to be way too optimistic about common risks and pessimistic about uncommon ones.)
This was also used to explain mammalian postpartum depression, when the mother has to make a wretching call as to whether to keep the offspring given its health, her health and the environmental context.
This fits exactly with how depression feels to me, and appears to manifest itself in me behavior-wise, according to my partner. Def going to give this some thought. Thanks!
My personal experience is that the cost of enduring a negative stimulus is not simply a function of the magnitude of the negative stimulus, but rather the magnitude of the negative stimulus in relation to the magnitude of all other concurrent negative stimuli. This study controls the environment so that a single negative stimulus is isolated and additional external negative stimuli are minimized, but it cannot control for the fact that a depressed person also endures a constant barrage of negative stimuli which are generated internally (hopelessness, exhaustion, fear, self-doubt, etc). The magnitude of these internally generated negative stimuli is likely much larger than that of the aversive external stimulus used in this study, so it seems reasonable that the marginal relief obtained by avoiding the external stimulus may be perceived as relatively negligible, or at least diminished to the point that the cost of avoiding is greater than the cost of enduring.
"These findings suggest that in young adults, depressive symptoms are associated with difficulty in overriding prepotent responses to actively avoid aversive outcomes in the absence of reward."
My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly?
As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated reward).
Yep, a sentence only someone on tenure-track could love.
ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."
Your summary claims more than the original you quoted, no?
Example:
Case 1: Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, if they get less than 80% accuracy a loud annoying horn will blare. Then subject goes again and try to improve the score.
Care 2. Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, and if they get less than 80% accuracy they get notified that they didn't succeed at the test. Then they go again and try to improve their score.
The article strongly implies depression will make improvement more difficult in case 1 by the amount found in the study. But it doesn't necessarily imply that (or anything strongly) for case 2.
Your summary strongly implies that depression impedes progress in both cases at the same rate as the outcome of the study.
I'm not a domain expert but I'm going to guess "having bad outcomes" is as poor a paraphrase of "overriding prepotent responses" here as "having functions" would be to characterize functional programming languages.
I suffered from depression and could not do anything for many years. I knew exactly what to do but could not put “pen to paper” and execute. Wish people took mental health more seriously and I don’t mean taking meds. Depression can reduce someone highly intelligent and functional down to absolutely nothing.
For people interested in explanations of depression that's more than "It's an imbalance in brain chemistry" I recommend looking at the work of Lisa Feldman-Barrett. She explains how brains work¹ in computational & evolutionary terms & it's a lot better than the typical reductionist explanations in terms of chemical imbalances.
I think they got us good with the imbalance of brain chemistry back in the 90s when Prozac was all the rage. Prozac was the Ozempic of the era with the financial incentives to make it so. The patents have subsequently expired so it isn't the cash cow it was. Odd how the science that went with it has now been discredited.
It's learned helplessness, is it not?
e.g. when whenever you move toward a progress route it morphs into something threatening or otherwise aversive. Probably gets implemented in software by the bad people.
True depression is fucking scary. Imagine having zero motivation to create or do anything. You experience no joy. You have no future. You are trapped in this hole.
The article title is "Depression Levels Are Associated with Reduced Capacity to Learn to Actively Avoid Aversive Events in Young Adults". Are we sure we want to turn that into "Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events"? I don't think there's good cause to go from correlation to this particular arrow of causation here. Reverse causation or a common third factor are also plausible.
I think this could be helpful in adding agency back onto victims sometimes. At least instead of actively avoiding the idea of suggesting they had any contribution to the outcome
[+] [-] sfink|6 months ago|reply
When I'm really down, I can't bring myself to care about "aversive events". I might even welcome them a little bit, both because they fit my understanding better (everything is proceeding as it should be, this ant eating my flesh makes sense) and because it's an opportunity to feel something at least. For me anyway, depression is more about absence of affect than feeling "sad", and ironically it is maddening (and yet, in a sense I can't bring myself to care.)
Then again, my explanation suggests that depressed people ought to be better at avoiding harm through inaction, and I didn't see that in the abstract?
Another hypothesis is that you could stop at "Depression Reduces Capacity to Learn". It feels like all mental processing is muted, and especially any forms of change. I guess you could do a study where you have to learn to actively prevent an aversive event for someone else. But the 1st hypothesis may still apply: depressed people may still care less about harm to someone else (than if they were not depressed). But at least you could separate out whether it's only because depressed people don't care what happens to themselves.
[+] [-] Nevermark|6 months ago|reply
The ability to make any mental and physical effort is greatly reduced to "depressed" levels.
It is the subconscious version of a situation where you need to climb out of a pit, but the walls are perfectly flat and oiled. Even though you need to get out of the pit, instead of scrambling, you just sit down.
The situation may not really be like that, but some deep cognitive machinery has concluded that it is.
It isn't anything like sadness. Although sadness could be part or proximate cause of a particular depressive episode, it is neither a necessary or sufficient condition.
--
I do believe depression has a real purpose. To turn off motivated but misdirected behavior, and force us to perform a reset of deeply held assumptions, expectations and motivations.
Pain effectively changes our expectations and behavior in the moment. Depression is like pain for complex situations. It forces major change, by disabling our current ineffective directives and giving us "time out" to slowly rewire. Until the subconscious believes we have found a new mental path, more aligned with reality, and lets motivation flow again.
But like battle surgery, it is a blunt instrument for doing something profound, and may inflict damage as well as repair it.
And when life circumstances don't let us take the pause and rest our brain is trying to enforce, it is a bit of living hell.
[+] [-] pton_xd|6 months ago|reply
Of course that mental state would hinder learning, you're missing all the brain signals and reward feedback to care about anything.
[+] [-] cheesecompiler|6 months ago|reply
This is how SSRI has felt for me also, incidentally: an even deeper apathy, setting in from lack of any emotion at all.
[+] [-] ferguess_k|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] leoh|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] OgsyedIE|6 months ago|reply
In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until the food web productivity the group subsists on has returned to normality. Phenotypes which reduce activity across the board without making any changes to their distribution of activities, just hoping for things to get better on their own, are likely the phenotypes that are most successful at surviving to reproduce within conditions of intragroup strife when these infrequent disasters occur.
If this line of reasoning bears out to correctly describe the actual selection pressures that have led to the genes for depression evolving, it follows that what we call major depressive disorder is in fact the genome seeing and carrying out false positives for needing the famine-survival strategy.
.
Incidentally, I first came across the theory I'm repeating here on Steven Byrne's neuroscience blog, if you want an avenue for finding sources.
[+] [-] munificent|6 months ago|reply
Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware.
Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together. Otherwise, the non-depressed ones would capitalize the tribe's resource and everyone would still end up screwed. But depression doesn't seem to have that sort contagious social component. On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state. And while the depressed person is likely conveying a whole lot of negative sentiment, most aren't actively attempting to get the people around them to be depressed too. That's the last thing most depressed people want.
[+] [-] andoando|6 months ago|reply
Only the system as a whole must carry superior fitness, not each of its individual components. Given a sufficiently complex system, its rather expected that there will be negative, or even outright destructive functions that arise. You can certainly try to find a positive reason for why cancer, disease, death during conception, etc exist, but there is a much simpler explanation.
Depression in this view, isn't something outright that was adaptively constructed, but merely a side effect of how the mind works.
[+] [-] SamoyedFurFluff|6 months ago|reply
My understanding is the existence of selection does not necessarily mean every trait that exists right now has an evolutionary benefit. It is more coarse grained that anything that doesn’t prevent you from breeding is acceptable. Depressed people are not made infertile by their depression, so there will be a subset of depressed people (assuming depression even has a hereditary component). This doesn’t mean the trait of depression has an advantage in order to exist, it just isn’t so much of a disadvantage that it doesn’t exist.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|6 months ago|reply
I remember from my days studying to be an actuary that the population that can best estimate mortality odds from the gut are actually the depressed. (Most of us tend to be way too optimistic about common risks and pessimistic about uncommon ones.)
This was also used to explain mammalian postpartum depression, when the mother has to make a wretching call as to whether to keep the offspring given its health, her health and the environmental context.
[+] [-] crmd|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] schmidtleonard|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cheesecompiler|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] ansk|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] Wurdan|6 months ago|reply
My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly?
As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated reward).
[+] [-] floatrock|6 months ago|reply
ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."
[+] [-] jancsika|6 months ago|reply
Example:
Case 1: Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, if they get less than 80% accuracy a loud annoying horn will blare. Then subject goes again and try to improve the score.
Care 2. Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, and if they get less than 80% accuracy they get notified that they didn't succeed at the test. Then they go again and try to improve their score.
The article strongly implies depression will make improvement more difficult in case 1 by the amount found in the study. But it doesn't necessarily imply that (or anything strongly) for case 2.
Your summary strongly implies that depression impedes progress in both cases at the same rate as the outcome of the study.
I'm not a domain expert but I'm going to guess "having bad outcomes" is as poor a paraphrase of "overriding prepotent responses" here as "having functions" would be to characterize functional programming languages.
[+] [-] lvl155|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gh0stcat|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ilius2|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] measurablefunc|6 months ago|reply
¹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KliAI9umFyY
[+] [-] Theodores|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thimkerbell|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] psyclobe|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thorio|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] getnormality|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hopelite|6 months ago|reply
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