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.
Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
51–60 of 67 posts
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of the "modern" point of view is that selection acting at the level of the gene (not the organism or group) is sufficient as a theory. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype go into this stuff in a lot of detail. Totally agree with your first sentence though. And even if there is a plausible adaptive function it may have only been adaptive in the past, or might be a side effect of some other ada…
Why not the group?
There's behaviour at an individual/group level that is only explained by selection at a lower level. Consider the placenta releasing allocrine hormones during pregnancy while the mother's body increases insulin levels, or consider male lions killing off the cubs of defeated males.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#53For 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. ¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KliAI9umFyY
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.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#54"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 r…
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.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#55Given 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…
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.
I think everyone is wired a little differently. I agree that sadness isn’t the right word for it either, apathy and empathy and hopelessness are bang on. But for me, I guess I take refuge in learning. I find it hard to go and do anything physical or social, and the only outlet left is to learn obsessively cause otherwise I’ll lose my mind. Maybe trying to stockpile knowledge for the day when the hopelessness goes away and it’ll end up being useful?
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#56I 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.
Was wondering... what eventually got you out of it?
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#57I 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
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#58True 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.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Other…
> 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. True, but that is when times are generally good. I doubt people would be "cheer up" in an actual disaster situation. From what i understand depressed people generally do well in disaster situations because they can still focus on critical tasks…
It is from the movies. Depressed people in disaster situations dont act and frustrated their close ones by being additional burden. Disaster does not cure depression, the issue is still there, just with worst consequences.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of the "modern" point of view is that selection acting at the level of the gene (not the organism or group) is sufficient as a theory. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype go into this stuff in a lot of detail. Totally agree with your first sentence though. And even if there is a plausible adaptive function it may have only been adaptive in the past, or might be a side effect of some other ada…
Why not the group?
Have a read about kin selection, for instance. There are lots of facts about e.g social insects (like the male/female/sterile ratio iirc) that were thought to only be explainable by group selection, but later were found to work out purely from considerations of gene selection. I'm just a layperson though, would highly recommend Dawkins writing on this stuff. It's much less polemic than his writing on religion, if that puts you off at all.
I think the basic criticism of group selection is that at an individual level it can be beneficial to go against the group's goal, and you need to explain why that doesn't happen (even very small advantages are rapidly boosted by selection). This is one of the great puzzles of selection - how does cooperation evolve from selfish interests? The theory of group selection just asserts that it does, which is not very satisfactory.